by Josh Karnes
* * *
Joseph Grady tried to snap out of this weird state of crazy déjà vu for the first part of the day, but eventually he gave up. Most things went just as he expected all morning. Just as he remembered. He knew what was coming most of the time, and by the time he was halfway through his first period class, he just decided to go with the flow. He realized that he didn’t need to pay much attention in class; he had already heard this lecture and taken the exam at the end of the year. And passed. He didn’t have to pay much attention in any of his classes. That left his mind free to work out this problem. To study his condition.
He was learning about this as he went along. The first thing that he plainly realized was that nobody else was experiencing the same thing he was. Considering how he could accurately predict pretty much everything, especially if he didn’t try to alter it, he knew it could not be a dream. There is no way you could dream the future in such detail that it felt like a memory. He had dreamed things before that he felt like were going to happen, like they were the future. But they never turned out that way, and dreams never had this kind of tactile detail like a memory.
Next he became quite aware of just how fragile this “future” in his memory was. Just like turning off the alarm early this morning had upset the course of events to the degree that he couldn’t predict them exactly, any time he didn’t follow along the memory-script in his head, he found it would alter the outcome in the near term and make the next future unpredictable. This put him in an odd quandary.
It was like he was somehow given a second chance to live his sixteenth and seventeenth years on this earth. The question of why, or how, was too difficult to even consider at this point. However, Joseph had quickly adapted a great security in knowing what was about to happen. There was a tremendous comfort in eliminating the unknown. But there was no opportunity to improve it if he did not risk changing it, and that risk was all but guaranteed to take away this comfort of knowing what was to come.
Speaking of what was to come, he had to risk changing it, because what was to come was that he was going to drown. And what would happen after that was utterly unknown. Could he prevent his eventual demise?
He was snapped out of this line of thought as he heard Mr. Freeze, his chemistry teacher, repeat his name. “Mr. Grady? Are you with us?”
And just then the immediate future-script in Joseph’s mind began to unravel and fray. What happened next was no longer sure, because Joseph could not help changing everything by simply thinking differently.
“Yeah, sorry. Can you repeat the question?” he said to a chorus of chuckles from the class. Oh, well, Joseph had always been a bit of a space cadet. Nothing new here. He usually preferred thinking on his own over interacting with others.
“How many valence electrons does carbon have?” Mr. Freeze asked, apparently again.
Joseph remembered the answer without even considering it. But he remembered someone else had answered it. It was Jenny. But this time, it was Joseph who said, “four”.
“That’s right,” Mr. Freeze affirmed. “We know that because it’s in group four on your periodic table…” Mr. Freeze continued but Joseph tuned him out. He knew all of this. Or at least he thought he did. In fact he didn’t know for sure what he knew about anything. Just a few hours ago when he woke up this morning, he could remember the next two years just like it had just happened yesterday. And now it seemed like that memory was some kind of illusion that was coming apart at the edges and would never hold together.