This wasn’t a regular hangover; I’d had those before. This one was special.
For a second, I was afraid I was paralyzed, and in my panic I tried to wave my arms. Unfortunately, my gross-motor control hadn’t quite woken up yet, so one of my hands hit the floor, hard. I lay there on the couch, cradling my injured appendage, as my blood circulation slowly returned. This allowed me to sit up, and when that didn’t kill me I managed to stand up and walk to the bathroom to get something for my headache. Also, I was so hungry my stomach was growling, and I realized that I hadn’t eaten a single thing yesterday, but had drunk an awful lot. Deep in the recesses of my still addled brain was a nagging feeling that I’d forgotten something.
I walked back to the living room and looked around. The Back to the Future DVD box was on the table, my laptop on the floor next to the table, and my clothes on another chair. Nothing special there. Absently, I turned on the TV and grabbed my laptop. On the screen, a man was gulping down huge bottles of water—at least six litres—and just as he wiped his mouth after the last one, there was a freeze frame, and a slick presenter walked into the picture asking contestants to bet on what would happen next . . . I managed to flick the TV off in time, before my stomach turned itself inside out. I reached for my laptop instead, but closed the lid as soon as I saw the screen.
I had googled Jennifer.
My heart stopped, and then started racing. Then it stopped again. I got up, the laptop hit the floor, the blood rushed to my brain, and I got dizzy. I sat back down on the couch and lay on my back.
I had to think, hard and painful as it was. Obviously, there were one or two (or several) gaps in my memory from last night. I dug my phone out from between the sofa cushions, worried sick that I’d find outgoing calls to numbers I didn’t know.
There was one. I had a vague memory: It’s the middle of the night, idiot!
I swiped left and deleted it immediately. Gone.
Out of sight, out of mind.
The fact was that I hadn’t been in touch with Jennifer since our junior year of high school, so I certainly wouldn’t have had the guts to contact her out of the blue last night. Would I?
I didn’t know anything about Jennifer’s life since 1986. I hadn’t tried to track her down in any way, and we weren’t even Facebook friends.
Why not?
Well, it was partly to do with the way we’d parted. She’d cut me off, not the other way around.
But why was I so afraid to send her a friend request? What was wrong with me? Was I . . . chicken?
I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. Ignored the voice.
I told myself, in a loud and clear voice, that it wasn’t that I was too afraid to find her; I told myself that she’d find me when the time was right.
We’d find each other, if it was meant to be. If she was my destiny.
That had been Jennifer’s answer to most things back then. Things that did happen—her getting a summer job at an ice cream stand, for example—were meant to be, while disappointments, such as me being sick and missing a Bond premiere, were brushed away with “It wasn’t meant to be.” Not then, at least. There would be other opportunities, other chances, she said.
That’s how I explained my inaction with Jennifer to myself. If it was going to happen, it would happen—somehow, somewhere, sometime. All I had to do was wait.
I had been waiting a long time.
Behind the Google tab, I found a Facebook page open, displaying search results for “Jennifer Berg.” I quickly navigated away from that to neutral territory: my timeline.
As soon as I saw the first posts, I knew it was a mistake.
I closed the tab, closed the laptop, closed my eyes.
I sat there for a while wondering if there was a welcoming room somewhere near me where I could stand up in front of my non-judgmental peers and say, “My name is Peter and I’m a Facebookaholic.”
As I struggled to get up from the sofa, something on the table caught my attention. It was Hanna’s letter, but it looked a little different from how I remembered it. As I picked it up, I realized that there was writing on the back page too:
Memo to self
Subject: Change your life
Why? Because it’s shit.
Drivers
A. I’m not happy. (I’m drunk, but that’s not it.)
B. Everything is shit, or mostly shit (in survey terms).
C. The world’s gone crazy.
D. I’m:
i. 46
ii. single
iii. lonely
iv. stressed
v. drunk
Action plan
A. To go back to when life was awesome.
i. Build time machine.
ii.
Ugh. I grunted and gave myself a whack on the side of the head. I just hoped I hadn’t posted that on Facebook! I picked up the laptop again to check.
I hadn’t.
But while I had the computer on my lap, just for kicks I googled “time travel.”
Ever since that sneak preview of Back to the Future, I’d been fascinated by the concept of time travel. Not enough that I’d undertaken a PhD in quantum physics or anything, but I did understand math and had read any articles I could find about it over the years.
For instance, I knew that I had gone from being the cool, skateboarding McFly to the crazy-haired Doc Brown, and that real scientists would call that time travelling—because it’s “time travel into the future.” We are all time travelling, all the time. But that’s not what I had in mind. I wanted to go back in time.
I got up, flicked on Total 80s FM (a-ha, “Take On Me”) and got a big glass of orange juice from the fridge. The hangover was still making me move slowly, but I knew I was onto something. I had been to the well of great ideas, deep in the black hole that contained everything that was and is, and I had returned with some kind of ore that might contain gold. It just needed refining.
Doc had the flux capacitor. In Terminator, they had the Time Displacement Equipment. But in both films the technical details of the hardware were fairly thin on the ground. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, they did a slingshot run around the sun to get to the speed of light and into a time warp, which is all well and good as long as you have a spaceship.
I found a Scientific American article about time travel and got excited when I saw a short item about “existing forms of time travel” because they listed “airline flight” as one of the methods. Could a jet plane travel around the world so fast that it would stop time? That’s almost how they did it in Superman, except that he flew around the Earth, opposite to the way it was turning, so fast and so many times that he forced the entire planet to spin backwards, which somehow resulted in time rewinding like a VHS tape. And I’m just not sure where to start in deconstructing that theory.
Unfortunately, back in reality, I learned that an eight-hour flight would only slow time by ten nanoseconds.
I needed more than that. Besides, I needed to reverse time, not just slow it down.
I knew Phileas Fogg had won his bet about travelling around the world because he moved back a day by crossing the international date line. I’d need to cross the date line an awful lot of times. I wondered what would happen if I went to the North Pole and ran around it in circles for a few hours. No, surely someone had thought of that already.
There was the wormhole theory, of course, but that didn’t seem feasible, mostly due to financial constraints. And time constraints. Paradoxically, it takes a lot of time to build a time machine, and I didn’t have it. Time.
Nor did I have a linear accelerator, a wormhole collection ring, or (again) a spaceship.
Moving on.
With a grunt, I lay back down on the sofa. I read the letter all the way through again, and then spent more time reading the back page, my memo.
I remembered that Bob Gale, the Back to the Future screenwriter, had gotten the idea for the story after he found his father’s old yearbook in the basement and learned things he hadn’t
known about him. It made Gale wonder if they would’ve been friends had they been in high school together.
I wondered if I would have been friends with my dad if I’d gone back in time to Kumpunotko High, circa 1955. I don’t know; my dad’s a bit of a strange one. I then wondered if I would have liked me—or if 1986 me would have liked this lonely old lump of present-day me.
And that’s when it hit me.
“And that’s when it hit him,” I said in my voice-over voice.
I got up. I didn’t need a flux capacitor or a wormhole. I sat down. I didn’t need money, or a spaceship. All I needed was determination. I got up again. I had the answer; it had been there all along. It was so obvious! As Doc Brown said, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”
“Anything!” I shouted, my fist raised.
Chapter 13
Smooth Operator
I PRESSED PLAY ON my boom box and the speakers crackled to life. There was a minor audio cough, where the maker of the mix-tape had pressed Record, and I tingled with anticipation, waiting to see what the first track would be.
Before the first note was even fully formed, a massive grin had spread across my face.
“Kids in America.”
The rapid, urgent synth beat was strong, and I nodded my head to the pulsating, swirling sounds of metropolitan life. I met Kim on the first line and sang along, word-perfect, until the drums kicked in, and then I clapped and danced around the room like a maniac through to the first chorus. Prince met my eye from the Purple Rain poster, sitting astride his purple motorbike with a look of steely approval. I grabbed my mirrored shades from the lamp on my desk, tied my bandana around my head, and hopped over a pile of Mad magazines as I rocked over to the mirror.
From over on the Ghostbusters poster, Venkman grinned indulgently.
My Casio calculator watch told me it was 10:02, and that the date was September 5, 1986. I checked on my ZX Spectrum+ but The Hobbit was still loading. Above the TV set was a picture of Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, giving me a cheesy grin and the hand signal for a-okay, and a postcard in which three monkeys played poker (I’d wanted a poster with the tennis player scratching her bum, but Mom’s frown had ruled that out).
I picked up my Polaroid camera, pointed it at myself, and gave the widest smile yet.
I was here, in good old 1986; if ever there was a moment for a celebratory selfie, this was it.
Click. Click. Nothing. The film must have run out. I checked, but the dial indicated that there were three exposures left. Maybe the battery had died? I popped the hatch open and found that the batteries hadn’t just died—they’d leaked and encrusted the terminals with battery acid, which had long since dried.
My Spectrum announced that it had finished loading, and I sat down to continue my progress through the eight-bit rendering of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
Five minutes later, there was a knock at the door.
“Come in!” I said, not even turning around.
“Hi, Peter. I thought you might be hungry, so I made a little something downstairs.”
It was Mom.
“Oh, thanks,” I said, my eyes still on the TV.
“Do you have to play that game all the time?”
I didn’t say anything. She opened the door carefully, pushing a pair of sweatpants on the floor out of the way. She demonstratively picked up a few Mad magazines from the floor, put them in a neat pile on my desk, and sat down on my bed.
“Is everything all right, Peter?”
“Sure, Mom, everything’s great.”
“Can you stop playing the game for a second, please, and look at me?”
“I can’t. There’s no pause, Mom.”
“I’ll wait.”
I could tell by the tone of her voice that she was getting angry, so I switched off the Spectrum and the TV—there was no point saving it; the save process took longer than the turn I’d just had, and I hadn’t made any progress anyway.
“Peter,” Mom said. That sounded ominous.
“Mom,” I said, trying to keep things light.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on! I’m just hanging out in my room, reading magazines, and playing video games. Awesome.”
“I know, and your father and I really like having you here. But . . . it’s just a little surprising. Have you lost your job? Are you in trouble? Do you need money?”
I’d known this little chat was going to come along, eventually.
They’d been surprised when I showed up at their door, but we’d all pretended that my visit was nothing special. Mom had gestured me in and then extended her hand to shake mine. We weren’t a family of huggers. “A firm handshake will get you far in this world,” my father used to say, and as I walked in, they both stood in the hallway, looking slightly surprised but also as if they’d been waiting there for me since I’d left home: Mom, a mix of Judi Dench (of A Fine Romance era) and Betty White (of The Golden Girls era), fussing about and helping me with my duffel bag, and Dad standing with his hands behind his back, nodding and looking like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride, his handshake at the ready.
I didn’t know what to tell them. I did know that I couldn’t just come out and tell them straight that I was a time traveller, trying to give myself a second chance.
“Everything’s good, Mom. Just taking some time . . . off. I’ll be here for a while, if that’s okay with you and Dad.”
“Of course. Let us know if you need help. You know we don’t have a lot of money, but if it’s money you need . . .”
“Mom, I’ll be fine.”
I used the future tense to cover my behind. I hated lying to my mother, but when I put it like that, I could still look her in the eye—which she always made me do if she suspected I was lying to her.
“Fine. Anyway, come eat.”
She got up and walked to the door. Right then, the upstairs phone rang.
“I’ll take it here!” Mom shouted to Dad downstairs.
“Okay!” Dad yelled back.
“Hello?” she said, and then, “Oh, hello.” A flat response, as if some bureaucrat had called to arrange a drain inspection.
Then: “Nice of you to call.”
Then: “Uh-huh, since Sunday.”
Then: “No, I don’t know. He won’t talk to us.”
Then: “Anyway, how’s Sofie?”
So it was clearly Tina on the phone. And I was clearly right about there being some unspoken frostiness between them.
“Yes, he’s right here, hold on. Give Sofie a big hug from Granny!”
Mom walked into my room with the receiver in her hand. The cord was stretched a little, but not even close to the max; we had swapped the manufacturer’s cord for a ridiculously long one so Tina could have some privacy in her room during her marathon calls.
Mom handed me the receiver and left my room, closing the door as far as the cord would allow.
“Yes, this is Peter,” I said, as if I had no idea who was on the other end.
“Peter, what the hell?”
Tina was raging mad.
“What?”
“I’ve been worried sick! I’ve called you a thousand times, but your phone’s off. I’ve emailed you. I would have sent you a Facebook message, but you seem to have deleted your account. I even went by your house and that creepy old lady told me you’d packed up and left.”
“Why did you call here, then?”
“Oh, believe you me, this was my last resort. But they are our parents and if you had gone missing—since you have gone missing—I thought they needed to know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said sheepishly, but then composed myself. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what this Facebook thing is that you’re talking about.”
“What? What is up with you?”
I sighed. Tina wasn’t going to let this go until she had got an answer. Usually, she wanted an answer that she could be happy with, but I was afraid that just wasn’t in the cards t
his time. Even so, she deserved an explanation.
“Tina, you know what’s up. I told you I wasn’t happy when I was,” I said quietly, in case Mom was snooping in the hall.
“You weren’t happy when you were? Can you start making sense, please?”
“It does make sense. I was sick of when I was, of modern life, of the mess I’d made of everything. So here I am now, back in good old 1986. And thanks for the makeover; the outfits are working nicely so far.”
“Wait . . . what? You told me that life was simpler back in the eighties. We had a makeover. You didn’t say you were going to give up on life and disappear!”
“I haven’t disappeared. I’ve travelled through time.”
“What? How does that even work?”
“Well, it’s already going fairly well, thanks for asking. Not using my phone was the hardest thing. It’s fascinating, the reflex to ‘post’ everything and then see how many people ‘like’ it. Bizarre. I still reach for the phone whenever I see something interesting, but now, if I feel like checking Facebook, I do ten push-ups. My arms are a little sore.”
Silence at the other end.
“Anyway, I left my phone in my garage in Helsinki, along with my futuristic car. I don’t watch the news, I’m off social media, I play my old games, and I read old papers at the library—that’s how it works,” I went on.
“Basically, you’re just going to live in the past? Please,” Tina said.
“Hey, the Amish do it! And they’re happy.”
“That’s your argument for this? Are you crazy?” she yelled.
“Actually, you know, I don’t think I am? For the first time in a long time, I have absolute clarity, and I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“I’ve heard of mid-life crises before, but this one . . . man, this takes the cake! Why didn’t you just buy a motorcycle like everyone else?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You come home, right now!”
“Tina, Tina,” I said, as calmly as I could. “You don’t seem to understand.”
As I walked out of my room and back to the phone’s cradle, the long cord slithering snake-like behind me, I inhaled and gathered all the mental strength I could, because I was about to do something I had never done in my life.
Someday Jennifer Page 8