Pythagoras taught us about such distances, the hypotenuse’s greater length. The ball’s path stretches between plate-strikes. Speed elongates the seconds. Time expands. This is the science behind science fiction’s speed-of-light narratives, the space traveler returning to an aged earth.

      Time, at least theoretically, is relative, flexible. Or in the case of Billy Pilgrim, broken.

      *

       “We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

      *

      In his account of the Battle of Marathon, the Greek historian Herodutus writes of Epizelus, an Athenian warrior who, despite suffering no physical injury, fell permanently blind after the soldier standing beside him was slain. Herodutus also writes of a Spartan named Aristodemus, a man so shaken by his battlefield experiences that he was given the nickname “The Trembler.” Aristodemus, shamed by this un-Spartan-like betrayal of his humanity, hanged himself.

      *

      So it goes.

      Here is Slaughterhouse-Five’s sad refrain, three words that have twined their way into our language. The phrase appears over a hundred times, a period to every reference of death. The water in a glass is dead. So it goes. A hundred thousand human beings burn. So it goes. With its repetition, the saying achieves an unsettling duality, both dulling and highlighting the carnage. Billy Pilgrim adopted the saying from his interstellar abductors. The Tralfamadorians, upon seeing a corpse, viewed it not as gone forever but, in the current moment, as a body in bad condition. They claimed death was not a period but just another event in the Mobius strip of time.

      The morning after the raids on Dresden, Billy Pilgrim stepped out of the slaughterhouse. I can picture the scene only as deeply as a man who hasn’t seen a corpse outside a hospital or funeral service. I can fill in the background with stock footage culled from documentaries and war movies. I can call upon my limited experiences of shock, but no, I can’t imagine emerging into a smoldering moonscape. I can’t imagine being just a few years out of high school—a child in a children’s crusade—and burying the women and children and old men that my side, the side God was supposed to be on, had killed. In this light, So it goes transcends a simple saying. So it goes is a cloak, a suit of armor, a protection against the nightmare of war and one’s—no matter how distant—culpability in the deed.

      Having reached my mid-fifties, I am a decade older than Kurt Vonnegut when he wrote his Dresden novel. I have buried family members and friends, but fortune has spared me the sufferings endured by so many. On Sunday mornings, I find myself looking over the obituaries, and I’m drawn to names I know—and to strangers my age or younger. The invisible hand is never far.

      So it goes might offer comfort, but I don’t want to be robbed of death’s finality. I am twenty, maybe thirty years from my end. I cherish every day, but from this end of the continuum, I understand a lack of death would be cruel. There is beauty in a story’s resolution. The years pass, and as I age, I view death as both the end and a sounding board. A relayer of echoes, of heartbeats and sighs and the steps of my march. Here is my only wish—let me keep my eyes open until I can bear to watch no more.

      *

      The Gospel of Matthew tells the story of Herod the Great who, fearing the Magi’s prediction of the arrival of the newborn King of the Jews, ordered the death of all male children in Bethlehem. Biblical scholars refer to this as “The Massacre of the Innocents.” In 1914, at the First Battle of Ypres, over 25,000 student volunteers fresh from the Fatherland’s universities were cut down. The Germans named the First Ypres “Kindermord bei Ypren,” the “massacre of the innocents at Ypres.”

      In 1645, an estimated 800,000 were slaughtered in the Yangzhou Massacre. Qing troops, under the command of Prince Dodo, conducted the killings as retribution for the city’s resistance. Wang Xiuchu, an eyewitness to the massacre wrote: “The women were bound together at the necks with a heavy rope, clustered like a string of pearls, stumbling with each step, and all of their bodies covered in mud. Babies lay everywhere on the ground. The organs of those trampled like turf under horses’ hooves or people’s feet were smeared in the dirt, and the crying of those still alive filled the whole outdoors.” The Yangzhou Massacre of 1645 shouldn’t be confused with the Yangzhou Massacre of 760. Different perpetrators, different targets.

      The penchant for slaughter obviously outstrips our ability to provide each with a distinct name. So it goes.

      *

      Consider these three theories of time and reality.

      Presentism—Only that which exists now is real. The future isn’t real. The past isn’t real unless there is something in the present to make it true. Being alive to witness this moment is the only way to ensure something is real. Don’t blink!

      A Growing-Past—The present is real, of course, but so is the past, and the past grows with each second-hand tick. The future—totally unreal. Too much chaos. Too many possibilities. Who knows? Who ever knows?

      Eternalism—Adherents of eternalism object to the ontological status of the past, present, or the future. Yes, they believe in the reality of these concepts, but there is no metaphysical difference between them. The delineation between past, present, and future lies in perception, a subjective classification that varies from person to person.

      “Ah,” say the Tralfamadorians, “now you’re starting to make sense.”

      *

      I am sixteen, and I’m spending the weekend at my brother’s college. 1976 is in full swing—flared jeans, denim caps, tight shirts with colors and schemes reminiscent of mankind’s hippest mode of transportation, the tricked-out van. Behind us, an afternoon of basketball in the campus gym, a trip to the cafeteria. Later, I will be adopted at a party—the youngster hanging with an increasingly rowdy crew, the room cheering me on as I crack another Pabst tallboy. Later still, after puffing my first and only clove cigarette, I will end the night kneeling on a slimy bathroom floor, a cartoonish orbit of stars around my spinning head.

      But now I’m in a hall claimed by the student government for movie night. This space once the dining room in Old Main, and around us the ghosts of generations who wouldn’t dream of attending dinner without a suit coat or dress. In two years, I will filter around this room, searching for department tables and amassing computer punch cards as I register for classes. In six years, I’ll be here to attend my induction into Kappa Delta Pi. But all of that waits in a future that is now my past.

      Folding chairs are arranged in haphazard clumps. I claim a spot near the front and sit on the floor. The 16mm projectors rest on a cart in the floor’s center. The lights go out, and soon, a faint, flowery thread of smoke drifts from the bathroom. Dust motes tumble through the projector’s beam. The cogs clunk and chug, the stammer of the film’s shaking loop. On the screen, a scarecrow wrapped in a blanket stumbles through the snow. Here is Billy Pilgrim, lost behind enemy lines.

      Hooray for the movies of the 70’s, their grittiness, their antiheroes, their questioning of the American Dream. Here was my time coming up, and as a youngster, I could walk to four different theaters. In those darkened caves, surrounded by a sense of space and openness lost to today’s multiplexes, I snuck