Then Again

by Rick Boling

  It was a hot, muggy afternoon, and the only air conditioner in the house at that time was in Mom and Dad’s bedroom downstairs. We were sometimes allowed to use their room during the day, and Sam suggested we take the equipment down there where it was more comfortable. By then, my fingers were sore from trying to play stuff I had yet to master at that age, and I needed a break. So I suggested an alternative.

  “Let’s just go for a swim,” I said.

  “Right. Where?” Sam asked.

  “In the pool, idiot,” I said, attempting to sound like a typical, sarcastic kid.

  “What pool?”

  “My pool, of course,” I said. Sam scratched his head and looked at me like I’d lost my mind, so I wandered over to the window and pulled back the curtains—and found myself staring out at a wide expanse of grass where our swimming pool should have been.

  “You nuts?” he said, walking up to look over my shoulder.

  My first thought was that Heyoka had screwed up and sent me to the wrong dimension. I was about to panic, when I remembered that our pool did not exist until that coming Christmas. Dad wanted it to be a surprise, so he had it installed while Mom and I were away in Indiana. In order to allow enough time for the installation, they’d arranged for me to take an extra couple of weeks off from school prior to Christmas vacation so we could enjoy an extended visit with our northern relatives. I wasn’t too thrilled with the idea, until Mom enticed me with the possibility of seeing snow for the first time in my life. Unfortunately, there was no snow, but my disappointment was immediately forgotten when we got home on Christmas Eve and I saw the large, kidney-shaped pool in our side yard.

  I was momentarily speechless while the memories began to fill in, and before I could answer, Sam said, “Are you feeling okay, Ricky? You’ve been acting a little strange. When did you learn to play all that stuff on the guitar, anyway? And what is this crap about a pool? You dreamin’ or something?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I stammered. “Just wishful thinking, I guess. Sure would be nice to have a pool, though.” I turned to see him backing away slowly.

  “Hey, I gotta go,” he said. “Mom’s gonna have dinner ready before long. I’ll see you at school tomorrow.” And with that, he disappeared into the hall, tramping quickly down the stairs and yelling “Bye Mrs. Voniossi” as the screen door slammed behind him.

  So my act wasn’t as convincing as I’d imagined. Well, then, back to Plan A.

  After giving it a little thought, I decided the perfect place for an accident would be the huge banyan tree in our side yard. Sam and I were in the process of building a tree house among its thick branches, and we’d both suffered minor cuts and bruises while working on it, so I figured a slightly more serious injury might not seem too suspicious. Carefully placing my new guitar back in its case, I changed into shorts and a t-shirt, then ran downstairs and headed for the side door.

  Seeing the direction I was headed in, Mom grabbed me by the arm as I passed her. “If you’re going tree climbing, you be careful,” she said. “And don’t get all dirty, or you’ll have to take a bath and change your clothes before dinner.”

  “Okay,” I said, wrestling my arm free. I let the screen door slam behind me and scrambled up the rope ladder to the half-constructed tree house. I was trying to figure out how to stage an accident without injuring myself too badly when I heard the screen door slam again and looked out to see my dad jump in his 1956 Ford and back out of the driveway. The tires screeched as he drove off, indicating a medical emergency. Dad was always on call at the hospital, and he also made daily house calls, mostly to the elderly patients that constituted about eighty percent of his practice. Good, I thought, at least he won’t be here to see through whatever ruse I come up with.

  I decided there would have to be some genuine head trauma if I wanted to make things believable. And if it was going to involve a faked fall, there should be some bruises and scrapes as well. This realization gave me pause, but after that stupid comment about the pool and Sam’s inquiries concerning my strange behavior, I knew I had to do something to justify my imperfect memory and lame attempts to act like a preteen. Though the idea of purposely injuring myself would have been anathema to the boy I remembered, my pain tolerance had, over decades of life in a deteriorating body, increased considerably, so I set about to the make damage appear as realistic as possible.

  Finding a chunk of two-by-four left over from our latest construction efforts, I first tried hitting myself on the leg, and was shocked at how much it hurt. Apparently, my young body was more sensitive than I had estimated. I waited to see if there would be any visible evidence, but nothing more than a little pinkness appeared. I was rubbing at the minimal bruise, when I heard Mom calling me, and I leaned over to peer through an open space between two large limbs.

  “What?” I yelled, hanging on with one hand and swinging out to see her standing in the doorway. And just then Mother Nature stepped in to help me out, though it wasn’t exactly the kind of help I might have wished for.

  “You need to get down from there,” Mom screamed, as if she’d discovered me standing on a railroad track in front of a speeding train. I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could get a word out, a deafening crack of thunder shook the tree.

  I would later realize I’d been ignoring the soft rumbles and occasional flickers of lightning from an oncoming afternoon thunderstorm, though it didn’t take being struck by lightning to initiate a more severe version of my original plan. All it took was the brain-rattling concussion of that thunderbolt to momentarily loosen my casual handhold on the tree limb and send me plunging through the tangle of branches below.

  I felt the first impact on my right shoulder, a thud that spun me around in midair and slammed my back against another limb. For a second or two my momentum was stopped, and I grabbed at what turned out to be only a clump of leaves. As I felt the warm smack of raindrops hit my upturned face, the limb gave way, and I fell, catching another branch with one leg and flipping head-over-heels toward the ground. The last thing I remembered before awakening in the backseat of Mom’s Cadillac, was feeling my ear smash against the hard, unyielding earth.

  I learned many valuable lessons from that fall, the most important of which was not, it turned out, how perilous it could be living in a world where, for a stupid twelve-year-old, danger lurked around every corner. The most poignant of those lessons would not come until a day later when I woke up in the hospital, although I would experience its origin the moment I regained consciousness in the backseat of Mom’s car. I was trying to rise up on an elbow, when the car swerved and threw me against the door. Then a loud thump and another swerve sent me sliding back across the seat. And when my head collided with the opposite door, I passed out again.

  The following twenty-four hours were blurry, as I went in and out of consciousness, finally awakening with a tremendous headache in the semi-dark of a hospital room. Mom was there, looking shaken and distraught, and when I’d made it back to full consciousness I remembered my original plan and pretended I couldn’t speak. I did try, however, to express curiosity through facial expressions and eye movements. And after a few minutes of this, Mom decided she should fill me in on what happened.

  I had suffered a concussion, she said, plus a broken right clavicle and humerus. There were a few other scrapes and cuts, but I should be good as new in a few weeks. Then she went on to explain what had happened in the car on the way to the hospital. She’d been driving pretty fast, she admitted, but the girl on the bicycle seemed to come out of nowhere. “I swerved to avoid her,” she said, “and it’s a good thing I did, or she might have been killed. She’s still in intensive care, but your dad says she’s going to be okay.”

  I widened my eyes to try and get across that I wanted to know more, and after a while she seemed to get the message. I was thinking the accident must have happened close to our house, but my sense of time was off due to the fact that I’d been unconscious for most of the trip.

  �
�It happened here on the south side,” Mom continued, indicating the low-income area surrounding the hospital. “You might know her, though. She older than you, but she goes to your school. Her name is Patricia. Patricia Williams.”

  It took me awhile to figure things out. I thought back to my first life, trying to remember if Pat had ever had a serious accident. I’d known her since my first day in seventh-grade chorus class, although it wasn’t until later in the school year that I’d worked up the nerve to start bugging her with love notes. And after we got together, there had never been any mention of an accident. It came to me then that the instant I arrived in this dimension, unless my actions were a precise duplicate of what I’d done the first time around, things would be different from that moment on. Had it not been for my dumb plan to injure myself, I wouldn’t have been in the tree, which meant there would have been no fall, no trip to the hospital, no causing Pat a brush with death, not to mention the suffering she must be going through.

  This realization made me wish with all my heart that I could talk to Aurélie; that even if we couldn’t be together, I could somehow slip out of this dimension and meet her on another plane, where we could have one of our intimate, philosophical conversations. Although I had known what I was in for in a general sense, experiencing firsthand the devastating consequences of my own stupid actions was sobering. And I was now officially terrified of the future.

  The Les-Paul Solution

  I went to see Pat in her hospital room as soon as I was allowed to get up, bringing flowers and hoping to apologize. But she wasn’t in the mood for visitors, especially anyone from my family. Her anger was, I suppose, justified, though from what I could gather the accident really had been her fault; she’d apparently run a stop sign and darted out into the path of Mom’s car in the early twilight. Of course, the fault ultimately lay with me, so I accepted her rebuff and left her alone after that.

  I agonized over the whole thing for days, but after a while I started imagining I could hear Aurélie’s voice in my head, reassuring me that there was no way I could have anticipated the consequences of my actions. I knew it was only a trick of the mind, but I found the dreamlike hallucination so comforting I decided to pretend it was real. After all, it did sound like something she might say. Little Miss Practical, I thought, hearing her sharp, logical retort to my playful sarcasm reverberate in my rattled brain.

  One consequence of the accident was that it essentially put an end to any chance I might have eventually had with Pat. I was so intimidated by her anger that I never gave any consideration to developing a personal relationship with her, which meant I should be able to avoid the alcohol and drugs she’d introduced me to in my other life. I would miss those things, yearn for them actually, but the yearning was something I found I could handle, certainly far easier than the addictions that would have resulted. Forgoing the sex, however, was another matter, one that became more and more difficult as I began to experience the explosion of desire that came with adolescence.

  But, at least for a while after the accident, there were other things to occupy my mind. One of these was how to continue my progress on the guitar while dealing with the huge cast that would soon encase my entire shoulder and arm. Dad said the breaks were clean, so there was no need to insert pins or screws, but in those days doctors tended to overdo the immobilization of broken limbs, both in cast size and the time necessary to ensure healing. So while I was waiting for him to come in and apply the cast, I tried to think of a way to get him to go easy with the thick plaster.

  In trying to convince everyone that my memory had been negatively affected by the concussion, I decided it should come and go, allowing me snippets here and there, then fading back into a mishmash of confusion. Thankfully, Dad bought this act, so he wasn’t surprised when I remembered my birthday present and asked if he could design the cast so my right arm would be in a position that allowed me to play while my bones healed. The idea wasn’t new, I told him; it had first been done years earlier for none other than the man whose name graced my new guitar. And Les Paul’s injuries were far more serious than mine.

  A world-renowned guitarist and inventor, Les Paul was instrumental in the development of the first practical solid-body electric guitar. He was at the high point of his recording career when his right arm and elbow were shattered in a near-fatal automobile accident. The doctors told him their only option was to amputate his arm, but Les refused to let them because it would have put an end to his guitar playing. After several consultations and experimental surgeries, a bone specialist suggested they replace the elbow with a piece of bone from his leg. This would mean that, once set, his arm would remain frozen in one position, so he had them set it at an angle that allowed him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him nearly eighteen months to recover from all his injuries, but he went on to have a successful career as a guitarist and recording engineer, eventually pioneering innovations like multi-track recording, and producing several hit records with his wife, Mary.

  Dad reluctantly agreed to my plan, and he even brought my new guitar in so I could determine the best angle for my right arm. The process was incredibly painful and had to be hurried so the bones would not have time to begin setting until we had the positioning right. But in the end it turned out to be one of the best ideas I would ever have, because for the next several weeks about the only thing I could do was practice the guitar. And by the time they removed the cast I had strengthened my hands and fingers and trained them to do things I would never have been able to accomplish at that age in my first life.

  During this time, Sam became my constant companion, accompanying me on the bass and helping me recapture the bluesy folk style I had developed as Rix Vaughn. We also began tinkering with ideas for recording and creating sound effects, with Sam using his innate mechanical and electronics expertise to design and construct innovative devices and circuitry. Sympathizing with the restrictions of my temporary disability, Dad agreed to finance these endeavors by opening a charge account for us at Alcorn Electric, a local Electronics and hi-fi supply and repair house. Mike Alcorn was a patient of Dad’s and a close family friend, so we were also given access to what Mike called their “Parts Graveyard,” a small room in the back of the building where they stored cast-off remnants of equipment they’d repaired.

  Before long our collaboration suggested that my new life was going to take an entirely different direction, and I began to wonder why I had not seen the enormous potential of Sam’s multiple talents the first time around. I’d always thought of him as a sort of simpleton, with his heavy southern accent and unassuming attitude. But now I realized that underneath that quiet demeanor lay some extraordinary talents. He not only had a gift for music and a natural feel for rhythm and blues, he was a genius when it came to electronics. And, as an extra bonus, he had a lovely older sister.

  Sarah was fifteen, an auburn-haired beauty whose shy, self-conscious manner and childlike naiveté made her particularly alluring. She wore no makeup and her naturally wavy hair was allowed to fall around her freckled, country-girl face without benefit of styling. The youngest of Sam’s four sisters, she doted on him as if he were her own child. She’d never paid me much mind in my first life, but in this one she seemed, if not interested, at least more inclined to accompany Sam when he came to the house. When she did, she would sit quietly, listening and occasionally humming along with our music. I could tell she had a beautiful voice, though it took me a long time to convince her of that fact.

  Eventually, as Sarah’s comfort level with me grew, she would sometimes come over by herself for a swim in our new pool, often staying afterward when I asked her to give me her opinion on a new song I was trying to learn. At first these visits were a little awkward, because she wasn’t much of a talker, wanting only to listen to me play and sing. After a while, though, I got her to open up a little by asking her to tell me about Sam and their family before they moved to St. Pete. It was clear that she idolized her younger brother, and w
hen I made this request, she surprised me by launching into a detailed narrative of his early life.

  Sam The Man

  Born Samuel Josiah Smith in Two Egg, Florida, Sam was the youngest of five children. Eunice and Gideon Smith had always wanted a boy and, after four pregnancies resulting in four girls, their efforts were finally rewarded. Sam was a skinny, reddish mouse of a thing that no one ever bounced on a knee for fear he might fall and stick right into the wooden floor like the tine of a pitchfork.

  Sam came into the world with one thought on his mind: he wanted to know how things worked. At the age of two, Eunice found him disassembling the toilet, which was the most mechanical thing in the house at the time. Six months later, he somehow managed to get the flimsy, paperboard back off the new, round-shouldered radio and had neatly laid out over half of the electronic parts before his father found him. Gideon scolded Sam for his handiwork and, after the radio was repaired, he devised a crude, wooden back for it and screwed it on with forty countersunk brass screws.

  It took Sam three weeks to learn to use a screwdriver well enough to get the back off again (he had to sneak into his dad's toolbox and practice secretly on the screws that held together the family's ancient steamer trunk). When he finally did get all forty screws out, the heavy wooden back fell on him and broke his right wrist, which, though it healed slightly crooked, did not affect in the least the unparalleled dexterity of his curious fingers.