Time Travel Omnibus, page 834
“Never mind.” His older self yawned, but seemed a little less fuzzy when he went on, “Yeah, things are okay. We went to the Probe last night, and—”
“Did you?” Justin broke in. He didn’t like the way that sounded: him stuck here in this miserable place, himself-at-forty having a good time at his favorite club. No, he didn’t like that at all. “What else did you do?”
“That after-hours place,” his older self answered. “Some guy came through with fliers, so I knew how to get there.”
Yeah, you’d have forgotten, wouldn’t you, you sorry bastard? Aloud, Justin said, “Lucky you. And what else did you do?” He could imagine Megan in his older self’s arms, all right. Now he could. He’d had plenty of time to try. Practice made perfect, dammit. He could hate what he imagined, too.
“About what you’d expect,” himself-at-forty said. Christ, he sounded arrogant. “I’m you, remember. What would you have done?” Justin sighed. He knew what he would have done, by God. But no. He’d stayed here by his lonesome—by his very lonesome—so his older self could do it instead. He sucked in a long, angry breath preparatory to telling himself-at-forty where to head in. Before he could, his older self went on, “And when I took her home, I told her I loved her.”
“Jesus!” Justin yelped, forgetting whatever else he might have said. “What did you go and do that for?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” his older self asked.
“That doesn’t mean you’ve got to say it, for Christ’s sake,” Justin answered. He shook his head in disbelief, though his older self wasn’t there to see it. His parents must have said they loved each other once upon a time, too, and how had that turned out? “What am I supposed to do when you go away?”
“Marry her, doofus,” himself-at-forty said, as if it were just that simple. “Live happily ever after, so I get to live happily ever after, too. Why the hell do you think I came back here?”
“For your good time, man, not mine,” Justin snarled. “I’m sure not having a good time, I’ll tell you.” He belched again. No surprise—how many Cokes had he poured down since he got to this place? Too many. With the carbonation, he tasted stale nacho cheese.
His older self took a deep breath, too, and said, “Look, chill for a while, okay? I’m doing fine.”
That only made Justin angrier. “Sure you are. You’re doing fucking great. What about me?”
“You’re fine. Chill. You’re on vacation,” himself-at-forty answered. If he didn’t know everything, he didn’t know he didn’t know everything. “Go ahead. Relax. Spend my money. That’s what it’s there for.”
When his older self mentioned the money, Justin forgot how chuffed he was, at least for a little while. “Where’d you get so much?” he asked. “What did you do, rob a bank?”
“It’s worth a lot more now than it will be then,” his older self told him. “Inflation. Have some fun. Just be discreet, okay?”
Which brought Justin back to square one. His older self kept trying to blow him off, and he didn’t want to put up with it. “You mean, get out of your hair.”
“In a word, yes.” Himself-at-forty sounded as if he was having trouble putting up with Justin, too.
“While you’re in Megan’s hair.” No, Justin had no trouble at all seeing pictures in his mind, pictures nastier than any he could have pulled off the Net. He sighed, trying to make them go away. “I don’t know, dude.”
“It’s for you,” himself-at-forty said. “It‘s for her and you.”
That, goddammit, was the trump card. If Justin-now was fated to break up with Megan, he didn’t see that he had any choice other than letting his older self set things right. He hated the idea. Every minute he spent in this miserable apartment made him hate it more. But he couldn’t find any way around it. Get married and get divorced? That was worse. “Yeah,” he said, and hung up.
Every minute he spent in that miserable apartment . . . from then on, he spent as little time as he could there. That worked better than staring at the TV and the PowerBook’s monitor and, most of all, the four walls. When he was out and doing things, he didn’t think about himself-at-forty and Megan . . . so much.
Getting out would have worked better still if he’d been able to go to the places he really liked, the local malls and the movie theaters and coffeehouses and restaurants where he’d gone with Megan. But he didn’t dare. He couldn’t imagine what he’d do if he saw her and his older self together. And what would himself-at-forty do? And Megan? Those were all terrific questions, and he didn’t want to find out the answers to any of them.
So he went to places where he could be sure he wouldn’t run into Megan or anybody else he knew. He killed an afternoon at the Glendale Galleria. He killed a whole day at the enormous Del Amo mall down in Torrance, which was supposed to be the biggest shopping center this side of the Mall of America. By the time he’d trekked from one end of it to the other, he believed all the hype. He hadn’t come close to hitting all the stores that looked interesting.
He grabbed some pizza down there, and stayed for a movie after the shops closed. That turned out to be a mistake. Sitting in a theater by himself was the loneliest thing he’d ever done, much worse than watching a movie on the VCR without any company. All the other people there seemed to have somebody else to have a good time with, and he didn’t.
And he was sure Megan would have loved this flick. She’d have gone all slobbery over the male star, and he could have had a good time teasing her about it. And she would have told him he only went to movies for the special effects—and they were pretty damn special. And then they would have gone back to his place and screwed themselves silly.
He went back to the place that wasn’t his: a long haul up the San Diego Freeway, which had plenty of traffic even after eleven at night. When he got there, he masturbated twice in quick succession. It wasn’t the same—it wasn’t close to the same—but it let him fall asleep.
The next morning, he drove out Topanga Canyon Boulevard to the ocean and spent the day at Zuma Beach. That would have been better with Megan along, too, but it wasn’t so bad by itself, either: nothing to do but lie there and watch girls and keep himself well greased with sunscreen. It let him get through another day without being too unhappy.
But, in spite of all the sunscreen, he came home with a burn. He was so fair, he could sunburn in the moonlight. Hot and uncomfortable, he couldn’t fall asleep. Finally, he quit trying. He put on some shorts and a T-shirt and went out front to watch TV. That experiment didn’t last long: nothing there but crap of the purest ray serene. After about twenty minutes, he turned it off in disgust.
“Now what?” he muttered. He still wasn’t sleepy. He walked back into the bedroom and got his car keys. He was an L.A. kid, all right: when in doubt, climb behind the wheel.
Driving around with a Pulp cassette in the stereo and the volume cranked made Justin feel better for a while. But he wasn’t just driving around. His hands and feet figured that out a little before his head did. The conscious part of his mind was surprised to discover they’d sent him down his own street toward his own apartment building.
If he parked between the Acapulco and the building next to it, he could look between them and see his bedroom window, a foreshortened rectangle of light. The curtain was drawn, so light was all he could see, light and, briefly, a moving shadow. Was that his older self? Megan? Were they both there? If they were, what were they doing? Like I don’t know, Justin thought.
“I’ve got spare keys,” he told himself in conversational tones. “I could walk in there and . . .”
Instead, he started up the car and drove away, fast. What would he do if he did walk in on himself-at-forty and Megan? He didn’t want to find out.
The sunburn bothered him enough the next day that staying in the apartment and being a lump suited him fine. The day after, though, he felt better, which meant he also started feeling stir-crazy. He went out and drove some more: west on the 118 into Ventura County. Simi Valley and Moorpark were bedroom communities for the Valley, the way the Valley had been a bedroom community for downtown L.A. when his parents were his age.
I could be going to Paris or Prague or Tokyo, he thought as he put the pedal to the metal to get on the freeway, and I’m going to Simi Valley? But, in fact, he couldn’t go to Paris or Prague or Tokyo, not without a passport, which he didn’t have. And he didn’t really want to. He just wanted to go on living the way he had been living. He’d spent his whole life in the Valley, and was in some ways as much a small-town kid as somebody from Kokomo or Oshkosh.
Justin didn’t think of himself like that, of course. As far as he was concerned, he stood at the top of the cool food chain. And so, when he’d pulled off the freeway and driven the couple of blocks to what his Thomas Brothers guide showed as the biggest shopping center in Simi Valley, he made gagging noises. “It’s not even a mall!” he exclaimed. And it wasn’t, not by his standards: no single, enormous, air-conditioned building in which to roam free. If he wanted to go from store to store, he had to expose his tender hide to the sun for two, sometimes three, minutes at a time.
He almost turned around and drove back to his apartment. In the end, with a martyred sigh, he parked the car and headed toward a little mom-and-pop software store. It turned out to be all PC stuff. He had Virtual PC, so he could run Windows programs on his Macs, but he left in a hurry anyway. They’d go okay on the iMac, which was a pretty fast machine, but they’d be glacial on the old PowerBook he had with him.
The Wherehouse a couple of doors down was just as depressing. Grunge, metal, rap, bands his parents had listened to—yeah, they had plenty of that stuff. British pop? He found one, count it, one Oasis CD, filed under THE REST OF O. Past that? Nada.
“Boy, this is fun,” he said as he stomped out in moderately high dudgeon. He spotted a Borders halfway across the shopping center and headed toward it. Even as he did, he wondered why he bothered. The way his luck was running, it would stock a fine assortment of computer magazines from 1988.
Behind him, somebody called, “Justin!” He kept walking. Half the guys in his generation—all the ones who weren’t Jasons—were Justins. But the call came again, louder, more insistent: “Hey, Justin!”
Maybe it is me, he thought, and turned around. A startled smile spread over his face. “Lindsey!” he said. Sure as hell, Lindsey Fletcher came running up to him, rubber-soled sandals scuffing on the sidewalk. He opened his arms. They gave each other a big hug.
“I can’t believe it,” Lindsey said. “What are you doing up here? You never come up here. I’ve never seen you up here, anyway.” She spoke as if one proved the other.
She’d always liked to talk, Justin remembered. He remembered the mole on the side of her neck, too. It was still there, a couple of inches above the top of her T-shirt. “How are you?” he said. “How’ve you been?”
“I’m fine.” She looked him up and down. “God, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Yeah, well,” Justin said, a little uncomfortably. He knew how little he would change, too, which she didn’t.
“What are you doing up here?” Lindsey asked again.
“Whatever,” Justin answered. “A little shopping. Hanging out. You know.”
“Here? It’s a lot better in the Valley.” She looked astonished and sounded wistful.
“Yeah, well,” he said again: he’d already discovered that. “Something new.”
“Slumming,” Lindsey told him. “But as long as you’re here, that donut place over there isn’t too bad.” She pointed. “I mean, if you want to get something and, you know, talk for a little while.”
“Sure,” Justin said. Like a lot of the little donut shops in Southern California, this one was run by Cambodians: a middle-aged couple who spoke with accents and a teenage boy who talked just like Justin and Lindsey. Lindsey tried to buy; Justin wouldn’t let her, not with his older self’s money burning a hole in his wallet. They got jelly donuts and big fizzy Cokes, sat down at one of the half dozen or so little tables in the shop, and proceeded to get powdered sugar all over their faces.
“What have you been up to?” Lindsey asked, dabbing at herself with a paper napkin.
“Finished my junior year at CSUN,” Justin answered, pronouncing it C-sun the way anybody who went there would.
“What’s your major?”
“Computer science. It’s pretty interesting, and it’ll pay off, too—I’ve got a summer job at the Northridge CompUSA.” Which my older self is welcome to. Half a beat slower than he should have, Justin asked, “How about you?”
“I’ve been going to Moorpark Community College kind of on and off,” Lindsey said. “I’ve got a part-time job, too—pet grooming.”
“Ah, cool,” Justin said. “You always did love animals. I remember.”
She nodded. “Maybe I’ll end up doing that full-time. If I can save some money, maybe I’ll try and get into breeding one of these days.” She sipped at her Coke, then asked, “Do I want to know about your parents?”
“No!” Justin exclaimed. “God no! Let’s see . . . I think you’d already moved here when my mom came out of the closet.”
“Oh, Lord.” Lindsey’s eyes got big. “That must have been fun.”
“Yeah, right,” Justin said. “Somebody shoot me quick if I ever set out to discover myself.” He turned his mother’s favorite phrase into a curse.
Lindsey didn’t ask about his father. The bad news there had been obvious while she still lived in the Valley. After some hesitation, she did ask, “What about you? Are you . . . seeing anybody?”
Justin had just taken a big bite of jelly donut, so he didn’t have to answer right away. When he did, he did his best to make it sound casual: “Uh-huh.”
“Oh.” Lindsey looked disappointed, which was flattering. And Justin couldn’t have sounded too casual, because she asked, “Are you serious?”
“Well, it kinda looks that way,” he admitted. And then, not so much out of politeness as because he didn’t want to think about how he wasn’t seeing Megan right this minute and his older self was, he said, “What about you?”
Lindsey shook her head. A strand of her short blonde hair—she’d worn it longer in high school—fell down onto her nose. She brushed it away with her hand. “Not right now. Not so it matters, anyhow, I mean. I’ve gone with a few guys since I got up here, but nobody I’d want to settle down with. You’re lucky.”
She sounded wistful again. She also sounded as if she really meant it. She’d never begrudged happiness to anybody else. Justin would have had trouble saying the same thing—he was mad as hell thinking about himself-at-forty having a good time with Megan. And how lucky was he if his older self had to come back from 2018 to try to straighten things out? But Lindsey didn’t—couldn’t—know about that, of course.
He finished the donut in a couple of big bites. “I better get going. I have to be at work before too long.” He could almost feel his nose getting longer, but the lie gave him an excuse to get away.
“Okay.” Lindsey stood up, too. “It was great to see you. I’m glad you’re doing so well.” She sounded as if she really meant that, too. Nope, not a mean bone in her body. She gave him another hug, this one a little more constrained than the one when they first ran into each other. “Listen, if you ever want to just talk or anything, I’m in the book.” She made a face. “I sorta wish I wasn’t, but I am. I get more damn telemarketers than you can shake a stick at.”
“Always at dinnertime, too,” Justin said, and she nodded. “They ought to do something about ’em.” He didn’t know who they were or what they could do, but that didn’t stop him from complaining. He headed for the door. “So long.”
“So long, Justin.” Lindsey followed, but more slowly, making it plain she wasn’t going to come with him once they got outside. He headed for his car. Lindsey walked in the direction of the Wherehouse he’d already found wanting. He looked back toward her once. She was looking toward him. They both smiled and waved. Justin pulled out his keys, unlocked the Toyota, and slid inside. Lindsey went into the Wherehouse. Justin drove back to the Valley. For some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, he didn’t feel so bad once he got there.
He kept feeling halfway decent, or even a little better than halfway decent, for a while afterwards. The driving need to call up either his older self or Megan and find out how things were going went away. What that amounted to, of course, was finding out whether anybody in the whole wide world cared if he was alive—and a good-sized fear the answer was no. Lindsey Fletcher cared. Justin didn’t think of it in those terms—on a conscious level, he hardly thought of it at all—but that was what it added up to.
And so, over about the next ten days, he found things to do and places to go that let him kill time without seeming to be doing nothing but killing time. He drove over to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which had gone from the coolest place in the world to semi-ghost town in one fell swoop after the ’94 quake. He beat the parking hassles at the new Getty Museum looming over the San Diego Freeway by taking a cab there—spending my older self’s money, he thought, feeling half virtuous and half so there! He found a pretty good Japanese restaurant, Omino’s, on Devonshire near Canoga. It’d be a good place to take Megan once himself-at-forty got the hell back to 2018 where he belonged.
“Superstrings,” Justin muttered in the apartment that wasn’t his. He’d fought his way through his physics classes; he couldn’t say much more than that. He wished he knew more. His older self did, dammit. That was definitely something to think about when he planned his schedule for his senior year.
Before so very long, though, he started muttering other, more incendiary, things. His decent mood didn’t last, not least because he didn’t fully understand what had caused it in the first place. The apartment in the Yachtsman started feeling like a prison cell again. Going out stopped being fun. Minutes crawled past on hands and knees.
