Pack something ordinary for the impossible

An impossible journey presents several packing difficulties. The destination may not exist. The weather forecast may require a theory of time. Your return ticket could be a philosophical disagreement. Under these circumstances, I recommend bringing someone who can explain things patiently and remembers that people need lunch.

That is part of the appeal of the premise of Alan K. Peters’s You Can Never Go Back. Keith Hadley is a fifth-grade teacher who likes his life predictable. Wren Calloway has spent eight years being thrown across the world, and sometimes across time, by the wrong doorway. When their paths meet, Keith believes her. An ordinary person gives an extraordinary situation a little room to be understood.

A teacher beside a Doorwalker is a promising combination. The impossible supplies the adventure. The ordinary gives us a way to feel its scale. A door that misbehaves is one thing; a door that interrupts a life with a familiar classroom and coffee order is another. We can picture what has been disrupted because we recognize what was there.

I like speculative stories that bring everyday competence along for the ride. Being able to organize a confusing situation, notice who is struggling, or ask for an explanation without humiliating the person giving it can matter enormously. These skills do not generally receive their own dramatic orchestral theme. Perhaps they should. Someone has to keep the expedition from becoming six talented people having seven simultaneous arguments.

There is a useful distinction between being ordinary and being interchangeable. A character’s habits, work, and attachments shape what they notice. Put a teacher, a mechanic, and a musician in the same impossible room, and each may find a different way into the problem. The strange setting becomes richer when it meets a specific person instead of a generic collection of heroic qualifications.

Believing someone is also an interesting beginning for a story. It need not mean accepting every explanation they offer. It can mean taking their experience seriously enough to listen, investigate, and offer help. That leaves plenty of room for uncertainty. In fact, it gives uncertainty something constructive to do besides standing in the corner announcing that everything is probably nonsense.

This is one way a speculative adventure can carry hope without making its world easy. The dangers can remain real, the rules bewildering, and the journey deeply inconvenient. Yet the relationship between two people changes what those difficulties feel like. Someone who has been carrying an impossible problem alone now has company. The problem has not shrunk. The burden has somewhere else to rest.

The book’s description points toward friendship, found family, and the meaning of home. Those themes fit naturally with a premise built around unreliable doors. When a familiar route can no longer be trusted, the people who stay attentive to one another become a different kind of continuity. I find that prospect more moving than a flawlessly calibrated navigation console, although I would happily accept both.

So, when the next fictional universe offers you a portal, consider the company as carefully as the destination. Bring curiosity. Bring somebody with a useful ordinary skill. Leave room for the person whose story sounds impossible. And label your sandwiches. Even a journey through time should not require a second expedition to discover which one contains the mustard.