Extra Life

by Derek Nikitas

  We turned onto Front Street, both of us out of breath after a four-block sprint. Twin bounced on one foot, clutching the bare heel of the other in his hand. Across the street, past a gridlock of cars, was our end zone—the former site of the Pastime Playhouse.

  But there was nothing former about it. The theater was there. A brick-faced 1930s Public Works project, the tube shaped ticket booth under the marquee awning with its dead and dusty light bulbs, and the readerboard letters explaining that the place was TEM OR RILY CLO ED.

  No sign of my father’s headquarters.

  “I thought you said it would be here,” Twin said.

  I stepped off the curb into the choked standstill of vehicles. I tuned out the crisis and kept my eyes glued on the building, staring it down, willing it to change. I didn’t blink. My eyes watered from the cloud of exhaust fumes around me.

  But there it was: the ghostly mirage of another building, superimposed on the theater. A newer, sleeker sign transformed the words Pastime Playhouse into Pastime Productions. Above it, a clock the size of a monster truck tire had hands that turned counterclockwise. My father’s headquarters was there, just past the veil of this dimension.

  “This is the place,” I said.

  Twin and I reached the three sets of entrance doors. We yanked on two handles simultaneously, and both of them clapped against their deadbolt locks. I didn’t hold out much hope for the third, but Twin dutifully gave it a yank. No dice.

  I shielded my eyes with my hand and peered through the glass door. The lack of sunlight dimmed the lobby, but I could make out the same old marble floor, the extravagant gilded faux-gold frames that used to contain the “coming soon” posters. Hand painted murals behind the concession stand showed iconic scenes from Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. A lost memory reclaimed. I could almost smell the popcorn.

  Out of that shadowed fantasy past, somebody was coming toward us. A lanky teenager with a screwy look on his face. I had to step back, thinking it was a reflection. But no, it was him, Virgin Russ. He stopped at the door and glared at us through the glass. The kid was a mess—mussed hair and a clammy cast to his skin.

  “Let us in!” I said.

  After inhaling another few seconds of doubt, he twisted the bolt lock and pushed open the door. “I guess I should’ve expected you… both,” he said.

  Inside, our voices resounded in the dusty front lobby. The glass displays at the concession stand were empty of candy, the popcorn machine purged. The cold was sharper than it should’ve been, and it made Twin in his flimsy gown hug his own shoulders. There was a pervasive whiff of gas, like when you overfill a lawn mower tank.

  “Can you tell me what I’m doing here?” Virgin asked us.

  “What do you mean? Don’t you know how you got here?” Twin asked back.

  Virgin glanced cockeyed at Twin’s hospital gown but didn’t ask for details. He said, “I was in my dad’s office upstairs, and then suddenly—”

  “You shifted,” I butted in. “You’re stuck on this ride with us.”

  “This place—this theater—it burned down years ago—but…”

  I wasn’t all that surprised to learn that Virgin Russ was bound to us with our inter-dimensional field trips. He rode the same shifts because his nature was identically coded. Whatever programming malfunction was capturing us in its loops was capturing him too. He was us.

  “We’re in another dimension. Dad’s office is still here—just—not—accessible, at the moment,” I explained, or tried to.

  “Don’t call him Dad like we’re brothers,” Virgin said. “He’s my dad. You left yours behind in some other… whatever. Don’t you dare forget that.” Evidently, this Virgin Russ had been given plenty of opportunity to get bitter about our existence before we even arrived on scene.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “Set all that aside right now. You need to understand that everybody here is in danger.”

  “From what?” Virgin asked.

  “Bobby Keene-Parker,” Twin and I said.

  That bomb was a total dud. Virgin said, “You’re kidding, right?”

  “The guy’s a maniac and he’s got a gun. If he finds you…”

  “How would he find us here?”

  Even as Virgin asked the question, the past began to slip from us again. The murals of Bogart and Bergman and Garland turned to shimmering afterimages, then they were gone. In their place was a metal staircase with Plexiglas steps lit by a pale blue glow. Small mood lights dotted sheet metal walls between rivets. Every decorative touch in the place reflected Dad’s Brave New World futuristic utopia kitsch. We had arrived at Pastime Productions.

  Twin doubled over and gagged from the vertigo, nothing left to vomit.

  The receptionist’s desk was unstaffed, the waiting area with its Swedish weird-posture chairs was empty. And at the far end, where the theater itself used to be, an elevator waited, door shut.

  I made for the stairs, wasting no time.

  “What are you doing?” Virgin said, and grabbed my arm. His eyes widened when he realized his rash move had caused us to make physical contact, but there was no cataclysm. I knew it, but Virgin was making all these discoveries anew.

  Virgin, the real boy, wanted to shut out all the troublemaking wooden Russ puppets dancing around him on their strings. He wanted to avert his eyes and pretend we didn’t exist.

  “You want us out of here, right?” I asked him.

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “Then let me go talk to Dad. He’ll have the solution.”

  Upstairs, the Death Star decor gave way to unfinished drywall, floors dusted with sanded compound powder. It was a simple hallway, two doors on either side and the elevator gleaming at the far end. Dad must’ve heard us because he popped out of a doorway on the left and said, “There you—are.” He lowered his chin to get a clear view of three Russ Vales over his reading glasses.

  “My God,” he added, with a wistful smirk on his face that was almost embarrassing, like he was admiring his own handiwork. What he’d only been able to produce once with his biology, he’d now replicated with his technology. Nothing to be proud of, Pops. It was a holy mess, like multiplying Gremlins by getting them wet.

  More than that, I wanted to rush down the hall and hug him, breathe him in, celebrate the fact that he was alive and well and un-shot. Heck, he was even dressed in khaki pants and a pressed button-down shirt. Clean-shaved and self-employed.

  “What the heck is that?” I asked him, nodding at the strange piece of equipment he was cradling in his hands. It looked like a Vietnam-era walkie-talkie, the size of a shoe box and outfitted with a nest of antennas, one of them as long as a fishing pole and bobbing, even as Dad tried to hold it still.

  “This,” Dad said. “Is a Flux Stabilizer. It’ll fix everything. I think.”

  DAD’S NEW office was a junkyard of gadgetry, wires and gutted computers—the contents of his office back home crammed into a room a fraction of the size. He and Virgin fit snugly inside, but we two replicas had to watch from the hall.

  The Flux Stabilizer’s long antenna prodded and scraped the wall no matter how Dad adjusted the angle. It was a monstrosity of chips and hinges that seemed bound together only by the winding of its own wires. Dad explained, “If the stabilizer is used in conjunction with the program, then in theory it will recalibrate any variables that have been thrown off track. It would send you back where you came from.”

  “In theory?” I asked.

  Dad slumped into his office chair with a sigh. He nodded at the bank of computer screens, all of them stone dead. The lights overhead flickered, threatened to die completely. These widespread technical malfunctions had screwed with his progress, and maybe even his calculations, I realized.

  “I haven’t been able to replicate the program exactly,” Dad admitted. “Obviously, I succeeded in some other universe, but not here, not yet. But it may not matter because I can bypass the problem. This stabilizer will interact with the program af
ter it’s been downloaded onto the cell phone.”

  He pointed to an empty slot in the center of the Flux Stabilizer. It had the basic dimensions of my cell phone and a connection jack.

  “Plug and play?” Twin and I said together. Our echo was getting annoying.

  “Sure,” Dad answered. “And these circuits will reroute the program through patch software. Sorry for the bulkiness. I didn’t have time for sleek product design—or for a trial run, for that matter.”

  “But you’re sure it’ll work?” Twin asked.

  Dad looked down at his wacko device, then back at us. “Sure as I’ll ever be. Call it a full reboot. It’ll send the user back to his own universe, to his own body, probably at the exact point he left it. At the same time, any other—versions—who are still separated from their home dimensions will be…”

  “Deleted,” Virgin Russ said, staring us down.

  “What about you?” I asked Virgin.

  “Nothing. I’m where I belong, so I get to stay.”

  Dad nodded and said, “It’s just how the math works out. The firm boundaries will have to be reestablished. I wouldn’t have predicted it, but this propagation of identical code is likely what’s causing all these anomalies, and a full reboot is the only thing that will stop…” Dad looked to the ceiling, the flickering lights, the implicit Blue Screen of Death sky just over our heads.

  “You mean too many Russes spoils the world,” I said.

  “I’m afraid so. Nature is a delicate equation. The universe is a complex program.”

  And you are a virus, were the words left unsaid.

  Twin got morose, staring at the Flux Stabilizer. I understood his hesitation. For me, a reboot was a no-brainer: back to a life with the same crappy letdowns any kid my age had to deal with. Ask forgiveness of a few people, and things went back to normal. But Twin’s home life was a tragic mess, with Dad possibly dead. Even in this reality, there would be serious fallout from the incident at Silver Screens, the crashed Aston Martin, all of it. It was a rigged lottery where I would be the only winner, and I felt like crap about that.

  “Can more than one of us use it?” I asked.

  “I didn’t expect there to be two of you…” Dad admitted.

  “Actually…” I said, because a key player was missing from the scene. One O’clock Russ—the guy who walked away from the car crash and went home to find Bobby in his living room. If Bobby ambushed him this time around, there might be no One O’clock left at all.

  Except I hated to think of the other Russes like they were dispensable CD-Rs with The Worst of Russ Vale copied on them. We thought, therefore we were. My fear for my existence meant I was real, not a glitch, and the same was true for each other Russ.

  Besides, the chance of One O’clock already having been “erased” by Bobby Parker would be no stroke of good luck. No way. Because One O’clock Russ had the key ingredient here: the cell phone where the Pastime Project would be downloaded. Without that phone, Dad’s reset device was nothing more than the most ridiculous skin ever designed.

  “One last thing,” said Dad. “Very important. You’re going to need some serious bandwidth to get enough power for the transference. You’re going to need the best receiver in town.”

  In other words, we were going to need the WCPF radio tower. Back to the scene of the crime.

  Dad offered the stabilizer to Twin and I, though he must’ve realized that only one of us could take it. He didn’t want to have to make a choice like that himself. We hesitated, and from down the hall came a pleasant ding.

  It was the chime that announced the arrival of an elevator car. I let myself get distracted by the noise and the sliding aluminum door, long enough to give Twin the edge. He took the device into his arms.

  Then the elevator door smacked into place and Bobby Parker stepped out, his gun already aimed. He shouldn’t have found us, but here he was, relentless.

  Twin dove for cover inside Dad’s office, while I fell off guard and stumbled backward against the drywall and collapsed to the floor.

  Bobby approached me stiff and determined. He steadied the gun with two hands as he reached point blank range, and then he didn’t shoot.

  “Which one are you?” he asked. “Tell me, now.”

  “Killing me won’t make you a star,” I said.

  Bobby dipped his aim and asked, “What?”

  I took my opening, propelled off the wall in a cloud of white dust, straight through my father’s office door. I body-slammed Virgin Russ by mistake so we oomphed in stereo and crashed into a house of cards made of spare circuit boards.

  Suddenly this was a craptastic plan, getting jumbled up with myself and trapped in a dead-end closet. All Bobby had to do was pivot and he had his own shooting gallery made of one regretful inventor and three identical reckless teens—bonus points for the triple play.

  A sputtering blue light flashed. Calm voices were talking somewhere. Twin hugged the Flux Stabilizer and shrank in fear from the gun. Bobby smirked at him and said, “What you got there?”

  My throat clutched shut. Bobby’s question was rhetorical. It was clear that somehow he knew what the stabilizer was for, just like he knew where to find us. He was ten minutes ahead of me, at least, on everything. Bobby knew the rules of the game. Bobby knew what we were and what needed to be done. Bobby was the antivirus.

  “Now wait a minute,” Dad said, stepping forward.

  Bobby elbowed Dad’s jaw and knocked him aside. He turned and put the gun to Twin’s forehead. I pressed my hands to my ears an instant before the blast. The noise pushed through anyhow, skull-rattling. Then, pure quiet, except for those strange and oblivious voices in another room, the voices I’d heard a moment before, calmly discussing whatever it was they were discussing, now magnified and echoing.

  Here was no longer my father’s office. I was in the projection room at the Pastime Playhouse. A pulsing blue light shined off a small glass window. It was the light from a digital projector casting a movie onto the screen down in the theater. The voices I’d heard were the actors in the movie being shown.

  I sat up and took stock of what had just happened. Bobby killed Twin, clearly enough, and Twin’s death had stabilized realities again. Fewer Russes meant no more inter-dimensional flip-flop. By the luck of a coin toss, I touched down in the movie theater instead of my Dad’s office.

  The Flux Stabilizer sat safely in my lap, just where Twin dropped it the instant he died. My salvation—I lifted it in my hands, heavier than I expected. Parts of it were hastily soldered together with steel elbow joints, an alien thing of interchangeable parts. But it was still missing its cell phone heart.

  And those voices, still sounding out from the theater speakers. I recognized those voices. Savannah and Bobby, speaking lines from my movie, “Take the Leap.”

  I peered through the glass at the theater screen below. It was in fact the movie I taped in the Silver Bullet diner—a short-reverse-shot sequence, miraculously edited together by someone else. My actors sat in their diner booth, playing the parts of the doomed motorcycle daredevil and the love of his life.

  This was final page in the script, where the girl volunteers to reject her college scholarship and stay behind, marry the daredevil, if only he’ll promise not to risk the jump that killed his father. This is where Bobby nails his climactic line:

  “I ain’t gonna let you toss your whole life to save mine, girl. You’ve got a million more leaps of faith, and maybe I got less, but we’re just going to have to let go and see where it is we fall.”

  I HEADED back down to the theater lobby, where magic hour sunlight bathed the glass entrance doors and lit the dancing dust motes. Real sunlight from a natural sky. The street outside was thick with traffic, but it moved at a steady pace, like any normal Friday evening. With fewer Russ Vales, the world was right again.

  The empty concession and posterless frames told me the place was still defunct, but that fact hadn’t stopped somebody from screening a movie in the th
eater. I carried the Flux Stabilizer against my shoulder so the longest antenna wouldn’t scrape the swinging door. Then I pushed through into the dark. The sound of cheering and clapping hailed from the speakers, but it was not meant for me.

  And the smell of gasoline was so noxious in here I could taste it. The white vinyl surface of the screen was marred with blooms of mold, but still the scene in progress was clear:

  A tween girl on a pitcher’s mound, red hair sprouting from under her cap. She winds up her pitch and throws, and the amateur video swish-pans to where the batter takes a foolish swing at a curve ball. This wasn’t the footage I’d shot in the diner. It was amateur home video from several years ago, our little league championships.

  Strike three for the win, and the team swarms the diamond to pile the star pitcher with their love. The last to mope out onto the field is a scrawny little Horace Vale. By then, the others have already got Paige Davis hoisted onto the tallest teammate’s shoulders. A triumphant moment captured forever, a moment that never happened.

  I understood that what we were watching was actual found footage from another universe. Digital video shot years ago, probably by some kid’s parent, then archived in their home movie collection, only to be salvaged in the present, smuggled into some other reality, and spliced into this film. And here was the final showcase screening.

  “What the hell is this?” a girl from the audience said aloud.

  I hadn’t expected a test audience, not with the theater’s shutdown status and the gas fumes. But a handful of viewers sat clustered together in two rows, dead center. Silhouettes in the dark, except the one who stood to ask her question. Her freckled, skeptical face and baseball cap were lit by the reflection from the screen.

  My chest heaved at the sight of her. The guy I used to be, just hours ago, in another world, would’ve never believed I could have such a visceral reaction to the sight of Paige Davis.

  On screen, the video cut to another scene: more amateur video footage of a line of soldiers ushering duffel bags through the security checkpoint bypass, into a crowd of waiting friends and relatives in an airport lobby. Kids hurtling forward to jump their uniformed parents.