Time Travel Omnibus, page 832
As if drawn by a magnet, he went back to the computer. He had no way of knowing when the smartass on AOL who signed himself with his own name would send more e-mail soon, or even if he’d send any more at all. But the fellow might—and Justin spent a lot of time online just about every evening anyhow.
Sure as hell, new e-mail from that same address came in before the microwave buzzed to tell him his dinner was done. He took another big swig of beer, then opened the mail.
No joke, it read. Who else but you would know you lost your first baby tooth in a pear at school when you were in the first grade? Who else would know your dad fed you Rollos when he took you to work with him that day when you were eight or nine? Who else would know you spent most of the time while you were losing your cherry staring at the mole on the side of Lindsey Fletcher’s neck? Me, that’s who: you at 40. Justin Kloster.
“Jesus!” Justin said hoarsely. His hands were shaking so much, the beer slopped and splashed inside the can. He had to put the can down on the desk, or he would have spilled beer on his pants.
Out in the kitchen, the microwave did let him know his dinner was ready. He heard it, but he hardly noticed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the iMac’s monitor. Nobody knew that stuff about him. Nobody. He would have bet money neither his mother nor his father could have told how he lost his first tooth, or when. He would have bet more money his dad couldn’t have remembered those Rollos to save himself from a firing squad.
As for Lindsey Fletcher . . . “No way,” he told the words, the impossible words, on the screen. Telling them that didn’t make them go away. Lindsey was a cute little blonde he’d known in high school. They’d never even broken up, not in the sense of a fight or anything, but she’d moved out to Simi Valley with her folks the summer his parents’ marriage struck a mine, and they’d stopped dating. A damn cute little blonde—but she did have that mole.
Justin went to the kitchen, opened up his dinner, and carried it and a couple of dish towels and (almost as an afterthought) a knife and fork back into the bedroom. He put the towels in his lap so the dinner tray wouldn’t burn his legs and started to eat. He hardly noticed what he was shoveling into his face. What do I say? he kept wondering. What the hell do I say?
That depended on what he believed. He didn’t know what the hell to believe. “Time travel?” he said, and then shook his head. “Bullshit.” But if it was bullshit, how did the guy sending him e-mail know so goddamn much? The truth, no doubt, was out there, but how could anybody go about getting his hands on it?
The line made him decide how to answer. I don’t watch X-Files much, he typed, but maybe I ought to. How could you know all that about me? I never told anybody about Lindsey Fletcher’s neck.
Whoever the other guy was, he answered in a hurry. Justin imagined him leaning toward his computer, waiting for AOL’s stupid electronic voice to tell him, “You’ve got mail!” and then writing like a bastard. How do I know? he said. I’ve told you twice now—I know because I am you, you in 2018. It’s not X-Files stuff—it’s good programming. Believe me, I’m back here for a good reason.
“Believe you?” Justin yelped, as if the fellow sending him e-mail were there in the bedroom with him. “How am I supposed to believe you when you keep telling me shit like this?” His fingers said the same thing, only a little more politely. But that’s impossible, he wrote, and sent the message.
Okay. The reply came back almost instantly. But if it is impossible, how do I know all this stuff about you?
That was a good question, what his grandfather called the sixty-four dollar question. Justin would have been a lot happier had he had a sixty-four dollar answer for it. Since he didn’t, being flip would have to do. I don’t know, he wrote. How do you know all this stuff about me?
Because it’s stuff about me, too, said the fellow on the other end of the computer hookup. You don’t seem to be taking that seriously yet.
Justin snorted. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Like I’m supposed to take any of this crap seriously. Like anybody would.” He snapped his fingers and laughed out loud. “I’ll fix you, you son of a bitch. Hassle me, will you?” His fingers flew over the keyboard. If you’re supposed to be me, then you’ll look like me, right?
He laughed again. That’d shut Mr. Mindgames up, by God. Except it didn’t. Again, the reply came back very fast. Right, wrote the stranger who claimed to be his older self. Meet me in front of the B. Dalton’s in the Northridge mall tomorrow night at 6:30 and I’ll buy you dinner. You’ll see for yourself.
“Huh,” Justin said. He hadn’t expected to have his bluff called. He hadn’t thought it was a bluff. He typed three defiant words—See you there—sent them off, and shut down his iMac. It was still early, but he’d had enough electronic weirdness for one night.
Like Topanga Plaza, the Northridge mall was one of Justin’s favorite places. He’d spent a lot of time at both of them, shopping and killing things at the arcade (though Topanga, for some reason, didn’t have one) and hanging out with his buds and just being by himself. He’d been especially glad of places to be by himself when his parents’ marriage went south. Northridge had just reopened then, after staying shut for a year and a half after the big quake in ’94. If they’d let him, he would have visited it while it was in ruins. Even that would have beat the warfare going on at his house.
He parked in the open lot on the south side of the mall, near the Sears. Everyone swore up and down that the new parking structures they’d built since the earthquake wouldn’t come crashing down the way the old ones had. Maybe it was even true. Justin didn’t care to find out by experiment.
His apartment was air-conditioned. His Toyota was air-conditioned. He worked up a good sweat walking a hundred feet from the car to the entrance under the Sears façade that was also new since the quake. Summer was here early this year, and felt ready to stay for a long time. Global warming, he thought. He opened the door. The mall, thank God, was also air-conditioned. He sighed with pleasure at escaping the Valley heat again.
He walked through the Sears toward the entryway into the rest of the mall. None of the men’s clothing he passed looked interesting. Some of it was for businessmen—not particularly successful businessmen, or they wouldn’t shop at Sears. The rest of the clothes were casual, but just as unexciting.
An escalator took Justin up to the second level. The B. Dalton’s was on the right-hand side as he went north, not too far past the food court in the middle of the mall. He paused a couple of times to eye pretty girls sauntering past—yeah, he was seeing Megan all the time and happy about that, but it didn’t mean he was blind. One of the girls smiled at him. He wasn’t foolish enough to let himself get distracted. Not quite.
Past the food court, on toward the bookstore. A guy was leaning against the brushed-aluminum rail—a blond, slightly chunky guy in a black T-shirt, baggy jeans, and Army boots. He’d been looking the other way. Now he swung his head back toward Justin—and he had Justin’s face.
Justin stopped in his tracks. He felt woozy, almost ready to pass out, as if he’d stood up too suddenly from a chair. He had to grab the rail himself, to keep from falling down. He didn’t know what he’d expected. That the other guy’s e-mail might be simple truth had never crossed his mind.
He wanted to get the hell out of there. His older self also looked a little green around the gills. And why not? He was meeting himself for the first time, too. Justin made himself keep going.
When he got up to himself-at-forty, his older self stuck out a hand and said, “Hi. Thanks for coming.” His voice didn’t sound the way Justin’s did in his own ears, but it did sound the way he sounded when he got captured on videotape.
Both Justins looked down at the hands that matched so well. “Maybe I’m not crazy,” Justin said slowly. “Maybe you’re not crazy, either. You look just like me.” He studied his older self. Despite the buzz cut that matched his own, despite the Cow Pi T-shirt, he thought himself-at-forty did look older. But he didn’t look a lot older. He didn’t look anywhere close to the age he was claiming.
“Funny how that works,” his older self said with a tight smile.
He was sharper, more abrupt, than Justin. He acted like a goddamn adult, in other words. And, acting like an adult, as if he knew everything there was to know just because he had some years under his belt, he automatically ticked Justin off. Justin put his hands on his hips and said, “Prove you’re from the future.” Maybe this guy was a twin separated at birth. Maybe he was no relation, but a double anyhow. Maybe . . . Justin didn’t know what.
His older self reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a little blue plastic coin purse, the kind only a grownup would use. Squeezing it open, he took out a quarter. “Here—this is for you.” He gave it to Justin.
It lay in Justin’s hand eagle side up. Justin turned it over. It still looked like any other quarter . . . till he saw the date. He thought his eyes would bug out of his head. “It’s from 2012,” he whispered. “Jesus. You weren’t kidding.” Four little numbers stamped onto a coin, and the reality of what he’d just walked into hit him over the head like a club.
“I told you I wasn’t.” His older self sounded like an adult talking down to a kid. That helped convince him, too. Himself-at-forty continued, “Come on. What’s the name of that Korean barbecue place over on Reseda?”
“The Pine Tree?” Justin said. He liked the restaurant. He’d taken Megan there once, and she’d liked it, too.
“Yeah.” Himself-at-forty sounded as if he’d needed reminding. Did that mean he didn’t go there in 2018? Before the question could do anything more than cross Justin’s mind, his older self went on, “Let’s go over there. I’ll buy you dinner, like I said in e-mail, and we can talk about things.”
Justin was hungry—he usually ate dinner earlier—but that wasn’t tops on his list. He came out with what was: “Like what you’re doing here.”
His older self nodded. “Yeah. Like what I’m doing here.”
As often as not, Justin and whomever he was with turned out to be the only Caucasians in the Pine Tree. He and Megan had been. He and his older self were, too. The waitresses were all Korean; none of them spoke a whole lot of English.
Himself-at-forty ordered marinated beef and pork they could cook themselves at the gas grill set into the tabletop. He ordered a couple of tall OB beers, too. Justin nodded at that. God knew he could use a beer right now.
As their waitress wrote down the order, she kept looking from his older self to Justin and back again. “Twins,” she said at last.
“Yeah,” himself-at-forty said. Justin wondered if he was lying or telling the truth. Damned if I know, he thought as the waitress headed back to the kitchen. He wanted to giggle. This whole business was too bizarre for words.
Instead of giggling, he pointed at his older self. “Tell me one thing,” he said in deep and portentous tones.
“What?” Himself-at-forty looked alarmed. Heaven only knew what he thought would come out of Justin’s mouth.
Justin leered at him. “That the Rolling Stones aren’t still touring by the time you’re—I’m—forty.”
“Well, no.” Now his older self looked irked, as if he couldn’t believe Justin would come out with anything as off-the-wall as that. Don’t have much fun at forty, do you? Justin thought.
Here came the waitress with the beer. She hadn’t asked either of the Justins for his driver’s license. A good thing, too. Justin wondered what kind of license his older self had, or if himself-at-forty had one at all. But he had more important things to worry about. After the waitress went off to deal with a party of Koreans at another table, Justin said, “Okay, I believe you. I didn’t think I would, but I do. You know too much—and you couldn’t have pulled that quarter out of your ear from nowhere.” He took a big sip of his OB.
“That’s right,” himself-at-forty said. Again, he sounded as if he knew everything there was to know. That rubbed Justin the wrong way. But, goddamn it, his older self did know more than Justin. How much more? Justin didn’t know. Too much more. He was sure of that.
He drank his glass empty, and filled it from the big bottle the waitress had set in front of him. Pretty soon, that second glass was empty, too. Justin killed the bottle pouring it for a third time. He waved to the waitress for another beer. Why not? His older self was buying. Himself-at-forty hadn’t even refilled his glass once yet. Terrific, Justin thought. I turn into a wet blanket.
Not only did the waitress bring his new beer, but also dinner: plates of strange vegetables (many of them potently flavored with garlic and chilies) for Justin and his older self to share, and the marinated beef and pork. She started the gas fire under the grill and used a pair of tongs to put some meat on to cook for them. As the thinly sliced strips started sizzling, Justin pointed at them and said, “Oh my God! They killed Kenny!”
“Huh?” His older self clearly didn’t remember South Park. Wet blanket, Justin thought again. Then a light came in his older self’s eyes. “Oh.” Himself-at-forty laughed—a little.
Justin said, “If you’d have said that to me, I’d have laughed a lot harder.” He decided to cut his older self some slack: “But the show’s not big for you any more, is it? No, it wouldn’t be. 2018. Jesus.” He made a good start on the new OB.
His older self grabbed the tongs and took some meat. So did Justin. They both ate with chopsticks. Justin wasn’t real smooth with them, but he looked down his nose at people who came to Asian restaurants and reached for the knife and fork. They could do that at home. Himself-at-forty handled the chopsticks almost as well as the Koreans a couple of tables over. More practice, Justin thought.
After they’d made a fair dent in dinner, Justin said, “Well, will you tell me what this is all about?”
His older self answered the question with another question: “What’s the most important thing in your life right now?”
Justin grinned. “You mean, besides trying to figure out why I’d travel back in time to see me?” Himself-at-forty nodded, his face blank like a poker player’s. Justin went on, “What else could it be but Megan?”
“Okay, we’re on the same page,” himself-at-forty said. “That’s why I’m here, to set things right with Megan.”
“Things with Megan don’t need setting right.” Justin could feel the beer he’d drunk. It made him sound even surer than he would have otherwise. “Things with Megan are great. I mean, I’m taking my time and all, but they’re great. And they’ll stay great, too. How many kids do we have now?” That was the beer talking, too. Without it, he’d never have spoken so freely.
“None.” Himself-at-forty touched the corner of his jaw, where a muscle was twitching.
“None?” That didn’t sound good. The way his older self said the word didn’t sound good, either. Justin noticed something he should have seen sooner: “You’re not wearing a wedding ring.” His older self nodded. He asked, “Does that mean we don’t get married?”
“We get married, all right,” his older self answered grimly. “And then we get divorced.”
Ice ran through Justin. “That can’t happen,” he blurted.
He knew too goddamn much about divorce, more than he’d ever wanted to. He knew about the shouts and the screams and the slammed doors. He knew about the silences that were even deadlier. He knew about the lies his parents had told each other. He knew about the lies they’d told him about each other, and the lies they’d told him about themselves. He had a pretty fair notion of the lies they’d told themselves about themselves.
One of the biggest lies each of them had told him was, Of course I’ll still care for you just as much afterwards as I did before. Megan wasn’t the only one who envied him his apartment—a lot of people his age did. What the apartment meant to him was that his folks would sooner give him money to look out for himself than bother looking out for him. He envied Megan her parents who cared.
And now his older self was saying he and Megan would go through that? He sure was. His voice hard as stone, he squashed Justin’s protest: “It can. It did. It will.” That muscle at the corner of his jaw started jumping again.
“But—how?” Justin asked, sounding even in his own ears like a little boy asking how his puppy could have died. He tried to rally. “We aren’t like Mom and Dad—we don’t fight all the time, and we don’t look for something on the side wherever we can find it.” He took a long pull at his beer, trying to wash the taste of his parents out of his mouth. And he hadn’t smiled back at that girl in the mall. He really hadn’t.
With weary patience, his older self answered, “You can fight about sex, you can fight about money, you can fight about in-laws. We ended up doing all three, and so . . .” Himself-at-forty leaned his chopsticks on the edge of his plate and spread his hands. “We broke up—will break up—if we don’t change things. That’s why I figured out how to come back: to change things, I mean.”
Justin poured the last of the second OB into his glass and gulped it down. After a bit, he said, “You must have wanted to do that a lot.”
“You might say so.” His older self drank some more beer, too. He still sounded scratchy as he went on, “Yeah, you just might say so. Since we fell apart, I’ve never come close to finding anybody who makes me feel the way Megan did. If it’s not her, it’s nobody. That’s how it looks from here, anyhow. I want to make things right for the two of us.”
“Things were going to be right.” But Justin couldn’t make himself sound as if he believed it. Divorce? He shuddered. From everything he’d seen, anything was better than that. In a small voice, he asked, “What will you do?”
“I’m going to take over your life for the next couple of months.” His older self sounded absolutely sure, as if he’d thought it all through and this was the only possible answer. Was that how doctors sounded, recommending major surgery? Justin didn’t get a chance to wonder for long; himself-at-forty plowed ahead, relentless as a landslide: “I’m going to be you. I’m going to take Megan out. I’m going to make sure things are solid—and then the superstring I’ve ridden to get me here will break down. You’ll live happily ever after. I’ll brief you to make sure you don’t screw up what I’ve built. And when I get back to 2018, I will have lived happily ever after. How does that sound?”
