Extra Life

  “That guy’s intense,” she said.

  “They’re supposed to be, I guess. The good actors.”

  “Can you believe this? I mean, really? What just happened?”

  “We deserved it,” I said. “We’ve got the talent, right?”

  “You know what? We do deserve it.” She flash-posed for an imaginary glamor shot.

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “When can I see the footage?” she asked, pawing me.

  “I need to get with my friend to edit it, but soon. Later tonight?”

  She wrote her phone number and home address on a napkin, then tucked it into my hoodie pouch pocket. Information I’d been desperate to attain for more than a year, offered with the trustful ease of old friends. The afternoon sun streamed through the window and lit her profile. A professional lighting crew couldn’t have made her look more destined for stardom.

  Together we laughed—because of serendipity, because we navigated two straight hours of impossible luck, because we just cast a lifelong memory, because the thick social walls between us were crumbled, and we saw each other for real.

  “Why’d you say I was your girlfriend before?” she asked.

  “Uh…” I said. Liar, blundering idiot. No serendipity here at all. I had manufactured and manipulated everything. And Savannah was about to shut down the whole production.

  But then she wrapped her arms around me, bands of metal bracelets tingling the back of my neck, and planted a strawberry-and-nirvana kiss on my lips.

  A FEW minutes later, Savannah and I said our goodbyes at the corner of Market and Front. I wasn’t alive, not really, until her kiss. The way she transported me felt even more mind-blowing than my leap through time. This was the reason I leaped. Somehow I’d found a way to arrange this for myself. Every day I sat around regretting the chances I didn’t take, but here I was, the chance taking me.

  I couldn’t believe it was true, yet all the buildings around us stood concrete as they ever were. The smell of hot grease from nearby restaurants, the fresh yellow pollen coating all the parked cars. The only oddity was the temp-and-time display on the Carolina Credit Union bank sign, which showed nothing but digital eights, straight across. I wanted to stop time, too. I wanted to get trapped in this instant forever, but Savannah was already walking away from me, glancing back with a smile.

  There was no time to lose myself in a mental music video. I needed to edit the footage I captured, and Paige was my only real digital editing contact. She knew the bells and whistles on Final Cut better than anyone, especially me, even though I owned the platform on my home computer.

  I’d have to convince Paige to help me cut the movie, and the best plan was to grovel in person. Five bucks left, I hailed another taxi, gave the driver Paige’s address. The meter reading clocked a $2.50 base fare and climbed twenty cents every few seconds. We were still a ten minute walk from her place when it hit $4.50, so I ditched the ride, paid the full five bucks, and hoofed it from there.

  South of downtown, the front yards were all sand and pine straw, if there were yards at all. Ramshackle bungalows built sixty years ago for dock and farm laborers mostly. The faded paint signs on storefronts hadn’t been changed in all that time, either. They still advertised fresh chitterlings and such.

  I’d never been inside Paige’s house, but we’d picked her up from there a few times for little league. No secret she was on full academic scholarship at Port City Academy. Her socio-economics thing, not to mention family tragedy, was part of what drove her to act scrappier than the trust-funders, I guess. Fuel for her inner fire.

  Hers was the left half of a duplex across the street from a brick apartment building decked with a dozen window unit air conditioners. I rounded the corner of that building full stride—and fell back when I caught the scene unfolding in front of her place.

  Twenty yards away from me, three cop cars sat parked, one of them with its light band spinning. The lack of sirens was not a relief. Nobody was in any hurry to help with whatever went wrong here. A sudden swerve in the road, a derailing on the track, a wicked divergence. In an instant, even before I understood what had happened, I knew I’d been making all the right changes to all the wrong conditions, the trivial things.

  An officer stood guard at Paige’s front door. Two more occupied the walkway, paired up with civilian passersby. I didn’t know the heavy woman with the baby in her arms, probably a neighbor, but the other one I recognized because I saw him every morning in the mirror. Russ 2.0.

  Conrad was also there, but he sat alone on the curb with his head in his hands. He didn’t seem to notice he was inhaling the exhaust fumes from one of the idling cruisers. The set of bikes lying on the sidewalk explained how 2.0 and Con got here.

  But why? The question wiped the taste of Savannah’s kiss from my lips. I kept my distance, pressed to the corner of the apartment building. I touched my pocket and realized for the hundredth time I didn’t have my phone. I couldn’t exactly stroll across the street toward Connie, either, not with the Other Russ standing nearby.

  Catty-corner from Paige’s duplex was a gas station that still had an old public phone stand beside the parking area. Probably a relic without a dial tone, and besides, I had no money left.

  Weighing options, I glanced back at Connie just as he lifted his head and matched his eyes to mine. He bolted upright. I sucked in my breath and slid out of view, wishing I could will myself invisible.

  I wanted to draw his attention, sure, but not this way, lurking like I’d been here all along, hiding out, guilty of something. The lush spring air was almost too stifling. My head full of particles and cotton. Suddenly, all I wanted was lay down and sleep. Recharge, reboot.

  The camera bag slipped from my shoulder and the Canon spilled out. Before I could crouch to pick it up from the dirt, Connie was there with his silhouette ringed by sunlight. I had nowhere to hide and no reason to want to.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him first.

  He was gasping for breath, his eyes huge and desperate behind the lenses of his glasses. I’d seen him like this before in another existence. That panic attack all over again.

  “Connie, what’s going on?” I asked.

  “Why didn’t… I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Didn’t tell you what? What’s going on?” I asked.

  “They think she… they think she killed herself.”

  The idea was so ridiculous I snorted. “Come on,” I said. “It was her brother, years ago. She’s probably just not answering her phone. I mean, seriously, she’s last person in the world…”

  But Connie shook his head. “No, she’s there. She’s in her house.”

  He didn’t have to explain the rest. I understood just then, like the final click of a combination lock, what had happened, or what didn’t, and why it was my fault.

  This was because I told Connie to keep 2.0 away from Paige. And this was because I deleted Savannah’s text, because then my other self never had any reason to go find Paige and ask her to be the cinematographer. Which meant Russ 2.0 wasn’t at the track to defend Paige against Asshat’s bullying.

  And without me there to deflect his taunts, Paige took the full impact, and limped away with a fatal wound nobody could see, the kind that grows in your thoughts and kills you from the inside, the kind that runs in the family, no matter how hard you try to fend it off.

  “There’s—there’s a mistake,” I said. “A paradox.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he pleaded.

  I touched the tenderness below my left eye. It shouldn’t have been there anymore because the sucker punch from Asshat never happened. If I never got punched, then the black eye should’ve disappeared. Even my memory of it should’ve disappeared. The swelling and pain on my face was supposed to be my badge of honor for saving Paige.

  “This is total bullshit,” I said.

  “You’re saying you didn’t know?”

  “This didn’t happ
en before, Connie. I swear. She was fine.”

  He wouldn’t stop looking at me as if I’d murdered her myself. Any second, he’d signal to the cops across the street, and they’d descend with their handcuffs and batons You did this to her, Horace Vale. It’s all your fault.

  All this tampering turned me into a paradox. My memory stored events that never were, like Paige chiding me on Connie’s front porch. You really don’t get it at all, she’d said. Somehow, I vividly recalled a past that never existed, a past that could’ve been but got erased…

  I was stranded in a history that wasn’t mine.

  “There has to be something. Some fix,” I said.

  Connie slipped the backpack off his shoulders and leaned against the brick exterior wall. Sweat dripped from his bowed head, even as he shivered. He said, “Almost right after school she stared posting these updates on thefacebook. Lashing out at all these people, making threats to hurt herself...”

  “I haven’t been online,” I said.

  “I didn’t notice right away, but there was this chatter. Other kids linking to her posts, egging her on. Making cruel jokes about her brother. Like one every thirty seconds. She was totally on the ledge. I tried to call her. Russ—” He stopped for a second, realizing the possible confusion. “He tried to call her, too. The other… you. She wouldn’t answer. We biked over, but we were too late. Her mother found her when she came home from work.”

  I shook my head. My rage flew in all directions, including at Paige. She shouldn’t have been so weak. Should’ve built thick skin after her family’s tragedy, after years of the sexist, classist, homophobic crap she dealt with at school. There was no good reason for her to suddenly cave, after everything.

  I snatched up the video camera and pitched it with a furious howl at the brick wall beside me. On impact it burst into a dozen careening plastic bits.

  Connie dove to the ground, shielding his head.

  “I wasn’t aiming at you,” I said.

  “You… you…”

  “What do you want to say, Connie? Spit it out,” I insisted.

  “It’s just… you showing up… and Paige… what happened to her…”

  “You think I made her do this?”

  “No, not that,” he said, unconvincingly. “Something’s too much of a coincidence. All this happening on the same day. That’s all. Something changed that shouldn’t have changed.”

  “I know,” I admitted. “She should’ve been with me down at the diner.”

  “But you said—”

  “I lied, Con, because I wanted to fix what went wrong. God, she wasn’t even on my radar. Paige was fine—her same unbreakable self. She was the last person… it wasn’t her I was worried about.”

  “I think you need to get out of here,” he said, “before they see you.”

  “I have to fix this.”

  “What can you do? It already happened. You can’t—”

  “I know, damn it! 2.0 should’ve been there to stop what they did to her. He was supposed to be there. I was there. I took a punch for her.”

  “Who? Where?”

  “The other me, does he have a black eye, too? Does he?” I asked.

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying. You told me to keep him away from her,” Connie said. I was supposed to be the one Connie could talk to without hesitation, his best friend, but he acted like he was confronting a bully. It tortured him just to be honest with me.

  “Connie…”

  “You shouldn’t have changed anything,” he said. “You need to get out of here, completely. Out of this—this existence. Go back to wherever you came from. You’re calling him 2.0, but that’s not how it is. He’s the first. You’re the copy.”

  “He would’ve put you in the hospital with a panic attack if I hadn’t stopped him. That’s what I prevented from happening. You know that? I’m not him—not anymore. I’m better.”

  “All these weird glitches?” he said. “Technical malfunctions? You said how it was like a virus got into the system somehow. Well, I get it now. I see what you mean.”

  “Don’t…” I begged him.

  “You’re the virus.” Almost silently, eyes on the ground, but he said it.

  “Connie, something’s not right here.”

  “You. It’s you.”

  “No, listen. Paige couldn’t have…” I watched a third shadow lengthening on the sand, and the sight of it shut my mouth. It was the same shadow that followed or led or trailed beside me all my life.

  The other Russ came around the corner.

  I was there, out in the open. Nowhere to hide from him, from myself. I’d been easing into the idea of two Russes for hours, but the fact of my sudden existence slugged him out of nowhere. He had no chance to prepare himself. The sudden body horror, the dislocating vertigo, the splicing of consciousness—it all came racing across the ten foot span between us.

  “What the?” said Russ 2.0.

  It was too much. I couldn’t face him. I turned and ran, Connie’s stupid flip-flops catapulting sand up my back and slowing my escape to the pace of a nightmare. But if I didn’t keep moving, my molecules would come apart and disburse in the breeze. I was sure of it.

  Because I was the copy. I was the virus.

  I STOPPED running when I hit the part of town that was nothing but empty grass lots and garbage blown against chain link fences. My lungs heaved and my bare toes burned from blisters, and I’d completely failed to outrun the images of Paige in my head. A Paige who wasn’t but should’ve been, who could never have killed herself but supposedly did.

  Already I knew it was a mistake to run. I should’ve faced him, the Other Me. I should’ve convinced him to let me have the cell phone back. That cell was my only connection to the Pastime Project, and maybe one more chance. My clock was running down. Because seven p.m. was an hour and a half away, and what came then was the Great Unknown.

  I hurried the rest of the way downtown and nearly crawled back into the Silver Bullet, aching with thirst. Sally the waitress was kind enough to sport me some ice water and quick use of the vintage yet functioning phone mounted on the wall. My finger was so shaky, I could barely get it into the slots that spun the dial.

  Dad answered on the first ring, like I knew he would. The only person left who might be able to wrap his head around what was happening and forgive what I did.

  But to explain this to Dad on the phone would’ve been the quickest way to reserve myself a cot at a drug rehab center. I couldn’t go back to that house, either—because Other Russ might show up before I could fully plead my case. It was his house, after all. He was the true Russ, not me—at least according to Connie. I needed neutral territory. So I asked Dad to meet at our old headquarters, the Pastime Playhouse.

  “Buddy, that place burned down years ago,” he pointed out.

  “I mean the empty lot, the spot where it used to be.”

  “I guess you’ll tell me why when I show up?” he said.

  I was only a couple blocks away, so I got there first. The place was fully marinated in the coulda-been mood of overgrown grass, scorch marks, and rubble. I belonged there, maybe forever, so I took a seat on a sturdy cinderblock and watched the brick wall where once there was a movie screen.

  There was a trace memory under the whiff of gasoline: the scent of buttered popcorn and the low bass rattle of the theater’s cheap speakers. Of course it was just nostalgia, that quieter kind of time machine.

  On my imaginary screen was a shot of a little league game. Mom calls me in to replace Paige on the mound. I won’t budge from the bench. “Let her finish,” I say.

  But that’s not how it really happened.

  Instead, I jumped in, eagerly, and failed.

  Here’s another classic blast from the past: Ninth-grade Conrad dials the combo wheel on his school locker. Just before he pulls up the latch I jump in and say, “Don’t.”

  But that’s not how it happened, either.

  In truth, Connie opened the lo
cker, and out flew a camouflage toy helicopter, piloted by remote from down the hall. The chopper buzzed past his head, and he collapsed with an ear-splitting scream. Everyone doubled over laughing, and I caught it all from a few feet away, play-by-play, on my cell phone video camera.

  That sickening prank wasn’t my idea. I was an accomplice. I was the one who figured out Connie’s combo by watching over his shoulder while he dialed it. Just so some other moron I was trying to impress could startle him with a toy. Harmless fun.

  At the time, I didn’t know Connie’s father was killed in a helicopter crash. I was brand new to Port City Academy. I didn’t realize how vicious that prank really was. Did my ignorance matter, or my apology and best-friend repentance every day since?

  A few minutes into my mental Worst Of Russ Vale clip show, Dad showed up at the former site of the Pastime Playhouse. Sweat pants, shirt stains, and scruff—the perfect getup for an abandoned lot. He eyed the place like he could see my past projected on the wall just as sharply as I could.

  I knew Dad could game-theory a solution, just like the time he drove me over to the Bower house and pressed me to apologize to Connie and his mother for the remote helicopter incident. I was gut-twistingly sorry, but Dad made me prove it. And Connie’s forgiveness turned out to be the deciding factor that kept me from getting kicked out of yet another school.

  When I stood up, Dad hugged me and asked, “What’s going on, kiddo?”

  “What do you think are the limits to what’s possible?” I asked.

  A slight grin. Subtext: you worry me, but you’re talking my language.

  “In a shoot-the-breeze kind of way,” he asked, “or scientifically?”

  “Hard core science.”

  “Well, anything’s possible as long as there’s no explicit physical law against it. That’s the uncertainty principal, the basis of quantum theory. An electron can exist in several places at once until it’s observed. Wave-particle duality, and all that. Even things that are against the rules could happen, theoretically, in another dimension, if there is such a thing.”

  “This is going to sound nuts, but what about a person?” I asked. “Is it theoretically possible for a person to be in two places at once, like an atom?”