Expiration Date

by Duane Swierczynski

  So I charged at the son of a bitch with all of my remaining strength.

  Momentum propelled me forward, forward, forward. There was a crashing sound and I felt like I’d tumbled into a Black & Decker food processor. Skin, shredded; bones, ground to dust. Nerves, sliced open and prodded with hot needles.

  But somehow I was still alive.

  And in the cool, soothing darkness of night once again.

  Dennis Michael Vincent lay next to me, gurgling, on the concrete path on the side of his house. We had gone through the kitchen window, and now pieces of glass were sticking out of his neck and forearms. Blood squirted from the right side of his throat in small, urgent beats. He moaned. Cursed the devil with the little bit of voice he had left.

  There was a burst of yellow light to my right. The sound of a wooden door creaking open. A neighbor.

  I crawled backwards until I felt a metal chain-link fence behind me. I tried to use it to stand up, but something weird was happening. I couldn’t seem to grab hold of anything. I heard a noise, then looked back at the house.

  Patty Glenhart was standing on the back porch. She saw me. I guess only kids and psychos could see ghosts.

  She screamed and turned and ran back into the house.

  I glanced down at my right shoulder. My arm was completely gone.

  The neighbors next door were calling out. Is everybody okay? Does anyone need help?

  Meanwhile, Dennis Michael Vincent choked on his own blood.

  I tried to forget my missing arm and used the three fingers on my left hand to pull myself up the fence until I was standing. Then I staggered along the side of the house, completely thrown off-balance. I turned right and walked a block, trying to make it to Frankford Avenue before I passed out.

  When I woke up Meghan was staring at me. She had a cell phone in her hand and a panicked expression on her face. I was on the floor, wrapped in Grandpop’s overcoat, his fedora still on my head.

  “Christ, Mickey—are you awake?”

  “Oh God.”

  I groaned, then rolled over on my side, wondering what Meghan was doing here. Wondering how I was going to explain why I was dressed in a coat, hat and gloves on the floor on a sweltering June morning.

  “Mickey! Come on, stop screwing around!”

  My right arm was still attached to my body, but like the fingers on my left hand, it was completely numb. A useless slab of dead meat hanging from my shoulder. Fingers were one thing. A whole arm was something else.

  The pain coursing through my body was unreal. It was like the flu on anabolic steroids.

  “I’m one button away from 911 unless you tell me what’s going on. And this time, I’m going to make sure they pump your stomach.”

  I looked at her. Swallowed.

  “I’m not…I’m not on drugs. I swear. Just help me up and bring over my laptop.”

  “What? Your laptop? Why?”

  “It’s important. Please.”

  Against her better judgment, Meghan put the phone down and helped me to the houndstooth couch, then grabbed my laptop from the cherrywood desk and put it on my lap. I used my three good fingers to pull it into a useful typing position.

  “Hey—what’s wrong with your arm?”

  “It’s numb. Hang on a minute.”

  It was difficult to type with three fingers. I knew plenty of people got by with two, but you have to understand—I was hardwired to type with at least eight. (The pinky fingers usually sit out my work sessions, like foremen on a construction crew.) Using three was unnatural. Using three was like trying to put in a contact lens using my elbows.

  “Want me to do that for you?”

  “I got it.”

  I hunt-and-pecked “Patty Glenhart” and looked for the entry I’d found earlier.

  It was gone.

  I tried searching for it a different way, going to the main page of the true-crime website (SinnersAndSadists.com, it was called—charming, huh?) and search by “W” and “P,” but there was no entry about a girl named Patty Glenhart.

  Meghan touched my shoulder.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Hopefully, something that isn’t there.”

  It sounded absurd, but maybe I’d actually gone back and changed things. Maybe there was a little girl who was alive right now because I traveled back to the year 1972 and pushed a pedophile out of his kitchen window. I’d lost the use of my arm in the process, but that didn’t matter, because maybe, just maybe Patty Glenhart was alive and the bad dreams were behind her.

  Meghan looked at me.

  “You know, for someone who’s trying to convince me that they’re not on drugs, you’re doing a really awful job.”

  “Swear to God, I’m not on drugs.”

  “You’re talking gibberish. I found you on the floor, wrapped in an overcoat and wearing a hat. Your right arm is numb. Tell me which of these things does not say, I’m having a lost weekend in the middle of the week. What’s going on?”

  There were a million reasons not to tell Meghan what was going on. The spiral of insanity I mentioned.

  But I told her anyway.

  After I’d finished laying it out for her—and I must have done a fairly good job, because she didn’t interrupt once—Meghan asked me if I wanted some Vitamin Water. I told her sure. She removed a plastic bottle from a paper bag she’d placed on the cherrywood desk, unscrewed it, then handed it to me. I was clever enough not to reach for it with my right hand. But not clever enough to realize that my three-finger grip on the bottle wouldn’t be enough. It slipped straight down, bouncing slightly on a couch cushion, and gushing pale purple liquid all over my lap.

  “Gah!”

  I lifted the laptop out of the way. It was a Mac relic, but it was also my only link to the outside world. That is to say, anyplace that wasn’t Frankford.

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” Meghan said, picking up the bottle and then darting across the room in search of a clean towel. Which she wouldn’t find, since I hadn’t done laundry since I’d moved in. There were two paper towels left on a roll that my grandpop must have purchased. She brought them over, started patting my lap.

  “Dear Penthouse Letters. I swear this never happened to me before, but one night…”

  Meghan shot me a sardonic grin. It was the first joke we’d shared in days, and it felt nice. She finished soaking up what she could, then balled up the paper towels and executed a perfect hook into the sink. Then she grabbed my knees and looked me dead in the eye.

  “Here’s how this is going to work.”

  “How what is going to—”

  “Don’t interrupt me. I’m going to try to shoot holes in everything you’ve just told me. If it all holds up when we’re finished, then I’ll stay and we can talk through this. But if I get the slightest hint you’re messing with my head, or inventing some bullshit story because you’re out of your mind on drugs, then I’m gone.”

  “Okay.”

  “Last chance. You swear that everything you’ve told me is true?”

  “Yes. To the best of my knowledge. Want me to put my numb right hand on a Bible?”

  Meghan was her father’s daughter. She wasn’t a lawyer. In fact, I had no idea what she did for a living—if she made a living for herself at all. Our friendship had revolved around life in the Spruce Street apartment building, as well as its nearby bars and restaurants. But some of her father’s prosecutorial skills must have rubbed off on her, because she grilled me like a pro.

  First, she demanded to see these “pills.” I told her to check the Tylenol bottle in the medicine cabinet. She found them, tapped one out into her hand. Examined it. Looked for a brand name, but couldn’t find one. They were smooth white capsules with only the dosage (250 mg) carved along one side.

  She placed the pill in a small Ziploc baggie like she was preserving the chain of evidence.

  “What are you going to do with that?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Next Meghan took
me through my alleged physical interactions in the past. So I could open doors and walk downstairs, but I had trouble picking up newspapers and comic books? Why? Light hurt my body, but only direct light—is that correct? What about ambient light? When your fingers fell off, did they disappear right away, or after a few seconds?

  “Okay, and you say no one can see you?”

  “Almost nobody. That kid I mentioned.”

  “Whose name you don’t know.”

  “Right. He can see me. And the little girl, Patty. I think she could see me.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  We went around and around this for a good half-hour until she finally circled back to Patty Glenhart. Meghan wouldn’t let go of it.

  “Your only proof was this profile on a blog.”

  “A true-crime website.”

  “Whatever. And when you searched for the profile, just now, it was gone, right?”

  “Right.”

  “What if the site administrator just took it down?”

  “You mean coincidentally, just a few hours after I first read it?”

  “It’s a possibility. Or, you could have hallucinated the entry.”

  I thought about this.

  “Wait. There was that piece in the Bulletin, with the ‘Girl Missing’ headline.”

  “Do you have a copy?”

  “No. I can’t bring anything back, remember?”

  “But this newspaper has to exist.”

  She turned away from me, as if making a mental note to herself.

  “You say you went back and got her out of that basement, but you didn’t prevent her abduction.”

  “Right!”

  “I’ll check the Bulletin morgue tomorrow. If you saw the headline, then it’ll be there.”

  “You know about the Bulletin morgue?”

  The morgue was part of Temple University’s Urban Archives center, and was basically the clips files of the long-defunct newspaper. Before the Internet, if you wanted to look up a piece of Philadelphia history, you had to go to the morgue and look through dozens of tiny manila envelopes, each stuffed with little yellowed clippings, which had been cut by hand and dated by some long-forgotten staffer. It was basically a steampunk version of Google, and it had been my secret reporting weapon for years.

  But it was old news to Meghan.

  “We went there freshman year. Our English professor took us on a field trip. Doesn’t every college send their freshmen down there?”

  Finally, Meghan turned her attention back to my numb arm and fingers, asking if I could wiggle them, or feel anything when she poked my forearm with a fork. Which she did. Repeatedly. Up and down my skin. But nothing.

  “Okay, this is kind of scary. Let me take you to the hospital.”

  “No. I hate those places. Plus, I’m pretty sure I don’t have health insurance.”

  “Even if I do believe your crazy ass story about the pills—and the jury’s still out, by the way—why wouldn’t you want to have your arm checked? You could have pinched a nerve. You could lose feeling in it forever.”

  “I just need to sleep. And what do you mean the jury’s still out? Have you found a single hole in my story?”

  “Not yet. But I haven’t found any proof either.”

  I thought about it for a moment. Then it hit me.

  “Okay then. I’ll give you proof.”

  Meghan held the steak knife with both hands, fingers on the handle and the dull edge of the blade. She looked up at me, pointed down at the pill. “Good enough?”

  “No. Cut it again. I don’t want to be out long.”

  “So an eighth, then? And let me repeat that this is a stupendously bad idea.”

  “Just cut the pill.”

  “For all we know, these pills are causing the numbness. And the hallucinations.”

  “They’re not hallucinations.”

  Meghan handed me the tiny sliver of the pill anyway.

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Right up there.”

  I pointed to the chipped wooden molding around the bathroom door. The molding was the same in 1972 as it was today. It hadn’t even been painted, as far as I could tell.

  “I’m going to go back and carve your initials into that molding.”

  “You’re such a romantic.”

  Her initials were MC. Not long after I’d met Meghan and learned her last name was “Charles”—names didn’t get more Main Line than that—I started calling her MC Meghan, which not only failed to make literal sense, but also annoyed her to no end.

  Meghan eyed the molding skeptically, even reaching up to brush it with her fingertips, as if I’d already carved her initials there, then covered it up with a generous helping of dust.

  “Again for the record…”

  “This is stupid, I know.”

  I popped the pill in my mouth then laid down on the couch.

  “See you in a little while. Watch that doorway.”

  Dizziness. Head throbs. Weak limbs. Then my eyelids felt like they were a thousand pounds each.

  I woke up in the office back in 1972. And yes, my right arm was gone, all the way up to the shoulder. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but I was. And more than a little horrified. The missing limb really threw my balance off. I swear to God, I felt myself tilting to one side.

  Plus, I’d have to do my initial-carving one-handed.

  There was nothing sharper than a butter knife in the kitchenette drawer. Not the most ideal cutting tool. Carving those two letters might take me the entire trip back to the past, but so be it. I would love to be there, in the present, to watch Meghan’s face when her initials start to carve themselves into the paint-chipped wood. Would they slowly appear, one stroke at a time? Or would she blink and then see all at once, the new reality conforming around her?

  I wondered if Grandpop Henry, sometime down the road, would notice the initials and take a moment to ponder them.

  The idea that I was about to change reality hit me hard. I’d read enough sci-fi novels growing up to know about the so-called butterfly effect—change one thing in the past, and the ripple effects could be potentially disastrous. Would something as simple as initials on a door frame make a difference? Sure, maybe if I carved a message like STAY OUT OF NYC ON 9-11-01 or BUY MICROSOFT. Initials were innocuous, though…right?

  Then again, I had prevented a little girl’s death a few hours ago. And now there was one more person in the world who previously hadn’t been with us. Had someone died in her place? Had she grown up to do something awful? What havoc had I already wreaked?

  I’d just pressed the tip of the knife to the molding when there was a loud scream outside my door.

  The cry of a boy.

  I knew I shouldn’t go to the door. I should just proceed with my original plan and start carving Meghan Charles’s initials into the wooden molding around my grandpop’s bathroom door.

  But you’re only blessed with this kind of insight after the fact. After everything’s been taken away from you, and it’s too late to change a thing.

  Instead, I walked across the room and pressed my ear to the pebbled glass.

  I heard heavy footsteps.

  There was the sound of slapping, and then another cry, and footsteps running down the hall. And then the gunshot slam of the door down on the ground floor. After a few minutes I managed to open the front door.

  Bright sunshine. It was morning. The intensity of the light made me blink. My vision turned white. I dropped the butter knife. I slammed the door shut and crouched down and turned my back to the door and leaned against it and concentrated on breathing slowly.

  I heard Erna’s shrill voice filling the hallway:

  “Listen to me! You have to be quiet! Do you want us to get kicked out of here? Thrown out on the street to live like animals?”

  And then:

  “Shut up shut up SHUT UP. Not another sound!”

  And then finally:

  “BILLY ALLEN DERACE YOU STOP CRYING OR
I’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT.”

  VIII

  No More Mickey

  I barely had time to process the name before that familiar dizzy feeling washed over me. No, no, not now. Not now! I slammed my fists into the wall, as if slamming my fists would help me stay there just a few seconds longer so I could think…

  Billy Allen Derace? That twelve-year-old redheaded kid downstairs was going to grow up and stab my father to death?

  Of course he was.

  I wasn’t even conscious for two seconds before Meghan was leaning over me, whispering in my ear. Her breath was sweet and warm. I could feel sweat beading on my skin, my cheeks and forehead burning and the veins in my head throbbing.

  “Hey genius, it didn’t work.”

  The levels of exhaustion in my bones and muscles and head were unreal. Maybe I’d been overdoing the pills. Maybe the loss of sensation in my arm and fingers was just the beginning—a herald of things to come. Maybe Grandpop Henry had taken too many pills and ended up in his coma.

  “Yeah.”

  I tried to roll over. After a moment or two, I gave up. Much better to stay here on the floor. Let the sweat dry on my skin. Give the throbbing a chance to die down. Take a little more time to recover.

  Meghan touched my forehead. I didn’t want her to. My forehead was sweaty, gross, hot.

  “Are you saying you didn’t go back this time?”

  “No, no…I did.”

  “Then what happened?”

  I didn’t want to answer any more questions. I didn’t want to think about butterfly effects or proof or my numb arm or Patty Glenhart or Billy Allen Derace or any of it. I just wanted the throbbing and the sweating to stop. I just wanted sleep.

  “Mickey Wade, will you please answer me?”

  “No. I won’t. You should go.”

  “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  “Just please go away. I need to rest.”

  Hurt flashed in her eyes, only to be quickly erased and replaced with anger.