Looking back through the time-machine motif

Looking back through the time-machine motif is the narrative device through which Rabo Karabekian tests what hindsight can and cannot repair. Imagining himself returning to earlier moments, he can see the losses and humiliations ahead, yet he cannot offer his younger self a useful warning. The time machine promises intervention, then makes the emotional cost of intervention unmistakable: to erase uncertainty would also be to take away the future his younger self still believes in.

The Present Reopens the Past

The motif takes shape in the present after Circe Berman’s conversation with Rabo stirs up resentment toward his father, who has been dead for almost fifty years. Rabo calls the resulting return of old feeling a hellish time machine. The phrase makes retrospective thought less like calm recollection than involuntary transport: a conversation on the beach sends him into adolescent anger, bringing his father’s imagined response to his later life into the present.

That return is sharpened by the paintings’ destruction. Rabo imagines his father laughing at the works that destroyed themselves through unforeseen chemical reactions between canvas sizing, acrylic wall paint, and colored tape. People who had paid fifteen, twenty, or even thirty thousand dollars for his pictures were left with blank canvases, while rings of colored tape and moldy-looking flakes lay on the floor. The imagined laughter does not come from a memory of his father seeing this failure; it is a counterfactual judgment Rabo can no longer check. The time-machine motif links the wreckage of the paintings to a more intimate fear: even his father would have joined those who mocked him.

The Warning That Cannot Be Given

Circe gives the motif a vivid, hypothetical scene when she asks whether Rabo would travel back to warn people about the terrible things he knows are coming. Her example places a young Armenian boy in a Los Angeles railroad station in 1933, carrying a cardboard suitcase and a portfolio as he says goodbye to his immigrant father and leaves to seek his fortune in a distant city. The older Rabo, with an eye patch, arrives from 1987. The imagined traveler is not simply a younger stranger: Rabo recognizes himself in the boy whose future he already knows.

Rabo’s answer is not a warning but silence. Asked what the old man would tell the boy, he says he would have to think, shakes his head, and cancels the time machine. When Circe presses him, he explains that he wants the boy to believe as long as possible that he will become a great painter and a good father. Hindsight thus creates an ethical limit. Rabo could tell the young traveler what lies ahead, but doing so would destroy the hope that sustains him before the future arrives. His refusal is neither ignorance nor a claim that suffering is harmless; it is a decision not to rob his younger self of the possibility of becoming someone.

A Device for Moving Between Times

The time machine also organizes the book’s movement into Rabo’s earlier life. After a conversation in the present, he explicitly invites the reader to return to 1932. The transition does not conceal that the past is being narrated from a later vantage point: the older voice enters the earlier scene already aware of how his attachment to Dan Gregory will end. At Grand Central Station, the young Rabo is stood up, but he is not angry, because he believes Gregory to be the greatest artist alive. The older narrator makes clear that this trust will have to survive much worse than a missed meeting.

That knowledge changes the texture of the remembered scene. The young man’s faith is immediate; the older man’s account carries the weight of a relationship whose later damage is not yet visible to the person experiencing it. The device lets the narration hold both positions at once, without pretending that the younger Rabo can act on information available only to his older self. The journey back is therefore not a restored past but a present-day act of telling, shaped by consequences already known.

Counterfactual Reunion and the Limits of Repair

Rabo imagines another return when he thinks of the fortune he could tell Marilee Kemp if he could go back. In the earlier scene, he is formal and feels unworthy of her, while she is cool and stiff with him. Looking back, he could tell her that they will meet again in Florence after World War II, when she will be wiser, and that she will endure the war before marrying Bruno, Count Portomaggiore, who has served as Italy’s minister of culture and led British Intelligence in Italy. He also knows that Dan Gregory and Fred Jones will move to Italy and die in the Battle of Sidi Barrani in Egypt.

This imagined disclosure differs from the station scene because it is a story Rabo tells himself about what he could say to someone else, not a warning he actually delivers. The future can be assembled into a compact account of survival, reunion, death, and marriage; the older narrator can see how much the young woman does not yet know. But the counterfactual does not alter the events or bring the later reunion into the earlier moment. Its force lies in the distance between the stiff, uncertain meeting and the life that can only be described from beyond it.

Retrospective Knowledge Without Escape

Across these episodes, the time machine makes hindsight both powerful and useless. Rabo can connect a beach conversation to anger at his dead father, recast an abandoned young traveler as his former self, and imagine telling Marilee Kemp the future that awaits her. Yet none of these visions grants him a way to revise what happened. He can narrate the past, but he cannot enter it as an agent without confronting the cost his imagined intervention would impose on the person he once was.

The motif’s recurring motion is therefore also a recurring stop. Rabo calls for the time machine, considers the warning, and cancels the journey; he moves back to 1932 in his narration, but carries the later ending with him. What the device reveals is not a secret route to correction but the ache of knowing too late. The future can make earlier hope look fragile, even foolish, while Rabo’s refusal to extinguish it gives that hope its own dignity. Hindsight offers testimony, not rescue: the older Rabo can witness the boy’s departure and imagine speaking, but chooses to leave him believing that a great painter and a good father may still emerge from the journey.