She narrowed her eyes at me. “Now why would you want to know that, son? What was is your name?”
“Lucas Van Doren,” I said without pausing. “I’m an old friend of Jack’s.” Close to true.
“Oh, the boy. Well, I suppose you could find out at the county office that they bought another home in Lakewood. Is that all? General Hospital is on.”
I thanked her and went across the street to find out if Jeannine or Sanjay’s families were still here. Jeannine’s family had moved away, but Sanjay’s mother greeted me and seemed happier to see me than ever before. Perhaps the intervening years had made her like me more.
“Sanjay is studying civil engineering at Columbia,” she said with a clap and a smile. New York City. It was the first easy to follow lead I’d gotten, and with a car as fun to drive as my Mustang, I hopped onto the I-90 and drove across Ohio and New York, and found the university in a matter of hours.
Except Sanjay wasn’t studying engineering, wasn’t even a student there.
***
I found him in a small, dingy coffee shop in the East Village, seated around a communal table with half a dozen other people, none of whom I knew. I waved at him, trying to find a way to break into their intense conversation. One of them, a petite woman with very short hair and black plastic glasses, sneered at me, then tapped Jay on the arm. “This strange man seems to want your attention.” I was still wearing my mechanic’s uniform. I didn’t exactly fit in.
Jay started talking before he saw me. “Look, if you’re here to harass us, we don’t—Jack?”
“Hey, Jay, can we talk?”
“His name is Sanjay,” said the woman in the glasses. “Don’t Anglicize him.”
“Corrine, it’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
“This is important,” she said.
He nodded, reassuring her, then pushed back from the table, squeaking on the old linoleum floor. We walked outside and stood on the sidewalk, where I marveled at how much had changed since the early 1980s. The cars were all ugly as hell, for one.
“What are you doing here, man? How did you find me?” Jay asked, looking around as if spies were scoping us out from the corner.
“Why haven’t you told your mother you dropped out of school? I went to the engineering school and two of your classmates said I’d find you here.”
“You’re stalking me? Don’t tell my mother.” He crossed his arms. After all these years, this wasn’t the conversation I thought we’d be having.
“No, I just wanted to see you. What are you up to these days?”
“Seriously, Jack, nobody does hot and cold like you do.”
“I’ve only just now jumped back.”
He inhaled and dropped his arms. “Wow. It’s been how long now?”
“Nine years?”
“Nine years. Shit, that’s a long time.”
“I didn’t think I’d lose that much time. I apologize for anything I’ve done in the interim that hurt you.”
Jay laughed, then looked at the door to the coffee house. “You want blanket immunity? You haven’t done me wrong, Jack.” That’s good to know, I thought. “But you haven’t been around, you’re so focused on your job and your parents.”
I jumped in my skin.
“Are they okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, they’re fine. I think you bought them a nicer house in some posh suburb. I really wish my parents would move, our home town isn’t a good place to be anymore.”
I nodded, telling him I’d seen it.
“Who are those people in there?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s the ACT UP group,” he said. He noticed my blank look. “Right, you jumped in ’83. I don’t have time to explain AIDS to you, man, but people are dying from a virus, a really bad one. My friends are dying, I lost my partner two years ago, and the politicians are like just ignoring this epidemic. So engineering can wait. It’s why I dropped out of school.”
“You’re doing okay, though? You don’t have this AIDS thing?”
“Watch how you talk, Jack,” he said, checking out the people around us again. “A lot of people in the Village would be offended if they thought you were making light of it. Thousands of people have died in the last twelve years. It’s a . . . really terrible way to die.”
“I’m sorry. That’s awful.”
He gave me a brief hug. “You don’t even know. Straight people treat gay people like lepers now, tell us it’s our fault we’re sick. Look, I have to get back to it. You want to catch up? Meet me back here in an hour, and we can get a beer.”
I nodded, and walked back to my car a few blocks away. Gay people versus straight people? Lepers? Synthesizer phones? I pulled down the vanity mirror over the steering wheel and checked myself out. I had really packed on some muscle. If I bent my elbows my biceps pushed against the sleeves of my overalls. My jaw seemed wider, and unzipping my uniform a few inches I saw I was covered with almost as much chest hair as a chimpanzee. From ear to ear I had black stubble on my face, but my eyes looked the same, thank god. I looked at the car clock. Forty-eight minutes to meet Jay. I shut my eyes and even though I was stressed and sick about Lucas, I fell asleep. It was the line of drool down my chin that woke me up, and I checked the clock on my dashboard. I sprang out of the car and raced to the corner. Sanjay stood there, frowning when he saw me.
“I was about to give up on your punk ass,” he said.
“I’m glad you waited.”
“Let’s get a drink,” said Jay, and I followed him. He pushed open a heavy, tall door and then we were inside a dark bar. A counter ran the length of the narrow space, and I flashed back to the marble counter at Mr. Van Doren’s tavern pre-Prohibition. I turned to Sanjay.
“So you’re still gay, huh?”
He smiled. “Still gay. Super gay, even.” We sat down at the bar. He ordered a beer, and I asked for a soda. When he raised an eyebrow in my direction, I explained that I’d never actually had any alcohol. I didn’t even know what to order or what I would like.
“Well, I know what I like,” he said, raising his glass.
We talked about life after high school, how he loved the city.
“It’s overwhelming to me.”
“Really?” he asked. “All the people?”
“All the people, how packed in everything is, all the smells.”
“Please honey, you’re not even here in summer. Then it really takes on some precious new odors.”
“I guess I’m not used to it.”
“I guess not. It grows on you. Like a fungus!” Jay laughed, and the bartender rolled his eyes.
“You know everyone here, eh?”
“It gets easier to know people when the community gets smaller every day,” he said, turning grim.
“You seem so grown up, Jay. Sanjay.” He waved me off.
“You can call me Jay, it’s all right. Liberal white people get way more offended about it than I do.”
I nodded, trying to follow along with him. His next question threw me well off track.
“So what’s it like being back in your body instead of that girl’s?”
“Jeannine told you?” I asked, attempting to sound casual.
He swallowed hard, but hadn’t sipped at anything. “Yes, she did. It must have been an adjustment.”
“It was, at first,” I said. I played with the base of my pint glass. “And then I was okay with it.” And I never minded it when I was curled into Lucas. In fact I like it a lot.
Jay leaned in toward me. “Did you like it better?”
“I’ve never thought of it that way. I don’t really know. I fell in love back there, though.”
“You did? But wait, if you were a girl, did that make you a lesbian?”
I grinned. “His name was Lucas.”
“Ooh, there’s hope for you yet.” He sipped at his beer, wiping the foam off of his lip.
Lucas in past tense. I watched them bury him. I have to undo his death. I can’t take it.<
br />
“He died.”
Jay looked at me, and I worried he was going to tease me or call me crazy.
“Jack, I’m so sorry. That’s really hard.”
“I’m sorry you lost your partner.”
“The country is such a fucking mess, man.”
“I should see what Jeannine thinks about all of this,” I said, running my finger along the top of my glass.
He sighed, pulling his glasses off and wiping them with the tail of his shirt. “Well, you can’t do that, Jack. Jeannine’s dead.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HE OPENED THE DOOR a little at a time, stopping after only a few inches. The wharf smell hanging in the air from Lake Erie was more intense inside the warehouse where he lived. Maybe he didn’t notice it anymore. He was smaller than I remembered, and disheveled, and smelled funky.
The bottom of the door scraped along the entryway floor, carving itself along a well-worn groove in the tile.
“Well, I wondered when you would turn up again,” said Dr. Dorfman. His thick mutton chop sideburns were gone, as was most of the hair on his head. Only his eyes defied his age, hedged in as they were with deep wrinkles that pointed to them like arrows.
“It’s good to see you,” I said, glancing around the room. It smelled terrible in here. His home was some kind of half-converted warehouse in the industrial district of Cincinnati, a mixture of reheated takeout and whatever wafted in from the waterway outside, none of which smelled good.
“Mm, is it?” he asked. He directed me to sit down. I found a spot on his couch that seemed the least dirty. “You’re a dainty thing for such a strapping young man.”
“If I knew how to respond to that, I would,” I said. “I know it’s been a long time.”
Dr. Dorfman dropped himself into an old easy chair across from me. The armrests had been shredded, the back cushion held together with half a roll of duct tape.
“Yes, Jack, it has. A very long time. I’m glad you’re well. You look well.” He said all of this like he didn’t particularly mean it.
“I suppose I am. I wouldn’t know. I only just jumped back two days ago.”
Now he sat forward, and his cheek twitched.
“You don’t say. Two days. That’s a long jump for this side.” For some reason he untied and retied his shoes. “Damn laces always coming undone.” I’d never heard him swear before. I played with my hands in my lap.
“You see,” he said to me, his head still bowed toward his shoes, “I know you’re just a figment of my imagination. You’re not real, Jack.”
“I promise, I’m real.”
“No, you’re a fantasy. It’s okay. Sometimes I talk to you, and my doctor says that’s okay. Time travel is a great idea, and it’s even theoretically possible, but nobody’s done it, not least a little boy in a neurological study I conducted twelve years ago. So have a nice day, Jack. You can leave now.”
“But I’m actually here, doctor. You helped me jump back before, about nine years ago.”
“Yes, yes I did. I even escaped from the hospital and corralled you poor kids into that house, to keep my delusion going. I’m sorry I behaved that way.”
He refused to make eye contact with me. Sanjay had told me the doctor had come up with this plot of taking responsibility for leaving the ward so that none of us would get in trouble. But Jay hadn’t realized that Dr. Dorfman believed the lie at this point.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I said, and he cut me off.
“Now, now, here you go, getting me all confused about what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s time for you to leave, Jack.” He stood up, waving me toward the door.
“Dr. Dorfman, I have questions for you.” I couldn’t go like this.
“Later, Jack, they’ll have to come later. I want you to leave.”
“Dr. Dorfman,” I began, but he cut me off.
“Leave!” He clenched his eyes shut, gripping his ears with his thin hands, his skin translucent enough to show the blood thumping through his veins. “Leave, leave, leave!”
I stood up. “Okay, I’m going. Stop shouting at me.”
I walked through the creaky warehouse, the floorboards giving way to poured concrete and then the few scraped tiles by his door. It was then that I saw the bookcase, filled with dust and medical textbooks, and one journal that caught my eye. The journal from his study that I used to see him scribble in at the ends of our sessions. He stopped groaning, checking to see if his delusion still stood in his home.
“Oh, you came for it, didn’t you? Just like the others.”
I turned to face him. “Others?”
“Yes, years ago now. They took all of my notebooks, but they didn’t take the notebook.”
“I don’t understand.”
“How can my own imagination not understand?” He looked about to begin moaning again.
“No, no, I get you. The notebook. The important one, right?”
“I knew, I knew,” he said. “I would get confused soon. I should call my doctor.”
“Why didn’t they take the notebook?” I asked, figuring I already knew the answer.
“Oh, Jackie Jack,” he said, walking over to me, “you are a stubborn delusion today. They didn’t find it because it was hidden.”
“You’re a smart fellow, doctor.”
“That’s right.”
“Doctor, I’ll make you a promise,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Let me take this notebook and I’ll never come back again.”
He considered my proposal. “Since you’re only in my imagination, I’m not really giving you the notebook, I suppose.” Another pause as he stroked his chin. “Deal.”
I shut the door as hard as I could so that he would know his dream state was over.
It was my fault that I’d ruined him. And all of my going back and forth wasn’t making any of this any better. Not only did I need to stop Lucas from dying, but I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to save Jeannine, and now Dr. Dorfman.
I really hate time travel.
Where is my damn Guardian?
***
The cemetery crept up the side of a bright green hill, small slabs of granite poking out of the short grass. From a distance it could have been Easter Island for all I knew, but it was peppered with gifts left by the living: bright flowers, a teddy bear, rocks set at the tops of some grave markers. I’d never thought about who came to these places, or what it would feel like to be a visitor in a graveyard.
Birds chirped in the trees around me. I searched through the rows of markers, trying to orient myself with the map the groundskeeper had handed me, but I wound up navigating by date of death. And there it was—Jeannine’s tombstone. I sat down on the lawn.
Jay had told me the story, mostly said through rough swallows of his throat. Helping out a stranger with a flat tire, her back to the road, she’d been struck by a truck driver who didn’t see her in her dark clothes. She’d pulled over because the driver of the wayward car was elderly and looked distraught. But the woman hadn’t driven her car far enough to the shoulder. Perhaps Jeannine should have known better, should have moved the car herself. We would all make different choices if we could roll back time. Except I had direct experience with that crap. Shit never works out anyway.
“I’m so sorry, Jeannine,” I said to the carved stone. Jeannine Maria Hernandez. August 14, 1964–March 18, 1989. Beloved daughter and wife. Standing up, I touched the stone, and tiny flecks of it came off on my fingerprints. Someday, I knew, weathering would erase this rock. At the foot of the marker I left a small bouquet of daffodils, her favorite flower. I touched the top of her marker and tried to push away the image of her dead, buried a few feet under me.
“I’m going to fix this, Jeannine.” I tried to believe myself.
***
The garage doors were shut on my car shop and the neon open sign unlit, so I unlocked the side entry and let myself in. I thumbed through the card in
dex at the edge of my desk. Everything, including this, had a thin film of oil, grease, or lubricant on it. I wasn’t the cleanest mechanic around. I found the phone number for my parents and noticed that the phone had push buttons on it instead of a rotary dial. Also my index finger could hit two buttons at a time, it was so big. There was too much junk to adjust to in this time.
My father picked up. “Hey, Jack, how are you? When are you coming over for supper?”
“When works for you, Dad?” I tried to sound as casual as possible.
“Oh,” he said, sounding like he was looking over toward my mother to assess her condition, “any evening is fine. How about tonight?”
“Sounds good. Everything okay over there?”
“Sure! The shop okay?”
I wasn’t sure if Armand or Frank had said anything to him. I’d called them saying I was going to be out all week.
“It’s fine. I took a couple days off because I haven’t had a vacation in a while.” I hope that’s true.
“Well, you’re entitled to it, Jack. Everyone needs a little R&R sometimes. Just don’t forget nobody will take care of the place like you will.”
This must be why Dad never took vacations, I thought. That and he didn’t know how to be close to his wife.
“Okay, I’ll see you tonight around six.”
“Love you, son,” he said. How long had it been since I’d heard that from him?
“I love you too, Dad.”
I set the receiver down and looked at my desk. No pictures of any loved ones. No trinkets or personal touches. Maybe those weren’t things to be found at a tough man’s work area. Also no ring on my finger. All the time in Jacqueline’s life expressing emotions, experiencing things from her perspective, now this body felt foreign to me. Who is Jack? What am I about? If I could help prevent suffering, why had I only made things worse?
Lucas and Jeannine were dead. I shouldn’t blame myself about Jeannine, but I was sure her death was connected to me in some way. Dr. Dorfman’s life was a shambles, and Sanjay seemed happy but also very angry and grieving for the loss of his friends and boyfriend. Could I bear to go see my parents?
I fumbled through the mail that had piled up, and I found a utility bill for my parents’ house. I tucked the address into my pocket, and drove to a hotel I’d seen on the highway. There was no point in finding my own home. The doctor’s notebook turned out to be full of nonsense—rambling, scrawly handwriting about physics and string theory and then a bunch of shit about aliens. I felt responsible that he’d lost everything, but man, what a waste of time trying to get my hands on absolutely nothing.
The Unintentional Time Traveler (Time Guardians Book 1) Page 25