 
# The  
ANACHRONISTIC  
CODE

_DÉJÀ ME  
_

by

DWAYNE R. JAMES

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 by Dwayne R. James

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A note from the author:

I'm unapologetic in the number of pop culture references that I make in this book. Please note that I give credit for each and every one and that it is not my intent to claim any of them as my own, or to incorporate aspects of their mythology into my story other than in a manner that is either referential or reverential.  
Indeed, it is my goal to pay tribute to the positive impact that they've had on my life, and the lives of so many others.

# The ANACHRONISTIC CODE Series

Available Now

DÉJÀ ME

the COMEBACK KID

MEMORIES from TOMORROW

Coming Soon

ESCAPE from TOMORROW

and a few more after that to be named later...

The folks at Merriam-Webster define an ANACHRONISM as:

An error in chronology; especially : a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other.

Which is all well and good until you actually become an anachronism yourself.

# Synopsis

It's 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen... AGAIN.

Josh has shifted back in time some fifty years and he doesn't know how, much less why. What's more, he's noticing temporal anachronisms—minute changes that would only be obvious to somebody who had lived through the 80s before.

Is Josh alone? Is somebody trying to send out a coded message?

He's going to have to find all the changes to figure it out.

# TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: Awakening

CHAPTER 2: Back to School

CHAPTER 3: Excerpt from Josh's journal

CHAPTER 4: Reruns

CHAPTER 5: Meltdown

CHAPTER 6: Saturday

CHAPTER 7: Excerpt from Josh's journal

CHAPTER 8: The jagoff and the Jag

About the Author

Also by Dwayne R. James

# Chapter 1

## Awakening

Swallowing awkwardly, I looked at the date on the newspaper again.

Wednesday, April 17, 1985.

"Is this yesterday's paper?" I croaked, addressing somebody who, until just a few minutes ago, had been dead for more than twenty years.

My mother came up behind me and, as if to prove that she wasn't an incorporeal ghost, leaned lightly against my lower arm as she looked down at the newsprint that I was holding, rather unsteadily, in my hands.

"That's the one," she said, before commenting on the subject of the paper's main headline, the imminent launch of _New Coke_. "I can't believe that it's really going to happen. They're actually going to change _Coke_."

I swallowed again as, somewhere off in the distance, I could hear the voice of somebody else who should also be dead. "What _I_ can't believe is that it's front page news," my father muttered from the kitchen table, his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. "It's a geedee soda pop."

He continued to speak, but I wasn't listening because I was staring at the date again.

1985.

My mind struggled to do the math, already overwhelmed with the absurdity—the ludicrousness—of everything that had happened to me since I had been awakened earlier by an oldies song on the radio that was, at least according to the Disc Jockey, being played for the first time.

It had been November of 2035 just last night, and I had been sixty-seven-years-old. That's what... fifty years?

So, that would make me seventeen... again.

By the time I figured out that the words my father were currently speaking were, in fact, directed towards me, it was too late to do anything other than look over at him as nonchalantly as possible and play dumb.

"I'm sorry, what?"

Dad swore under his breath as he repeated himself. "I said you'd better start getting ready if you want to catch the bus."

"The bus..." I parroted, distantly.

"Yes," my father replied patiently. "The bus. To school. It's where you're going today... Because it's a _school_ day." He was speaking slowly now, as you would to a dim child, making it clear that, in 1985, my family's penchant for sarcasm was alive and well. "And if you're going to wash that filthy mop that you call hair, then you'll need time to shower."

"Shower... For _School_..."

Both of my parents were staring at me as if concerned that I was on drugs—admittedly a common concern for parents in the 80s as much as it was one for me in the 2010s when I had checked (or _would_ check) Matheson's pupils for excess dilation whenever he was acting unusually weird, which was often.

Teenagers in any decade I guess.

I still hadn't truly accepted that what was happening to me was real, but if there was the _slightest_ possibility that the two people in front of me were actually my long-dead parents, then there was no way in hell I'd do _anything_ that might distress or worry them (even if I was technically older than them). This meant that my course of action was clear: I had to try and play along until I could figure out how I got here and—perhaps more importantly—why.

So, rather than arguing, I simply said, "Gotcha," stuffed what remained of my breakfast into my mouth, slipped away from the table and willed my seventeen-year-old body up the stairs.

"And get your lazy-ass of a brother out of bed too wouldya?" my father called after me. "I'm not driving him to school again when there's a perfectly good bus..." Mercifully, I didn't hear the rest of his rant, because I'd already entered the bathroom and closed the door behind me.

For a moment, I contemplated the door knob. With my hand still gripping it—as if touching something physical in the new reality that I now found myself in would somehow ground me within it—I took a deep breath and finally articulated the only possibility left as to what was happening to me, no matter how ridiculous it might sound.

"I've travelled back in time," I whispered, not wanting to entertain the thought very loudly, lest more volume make something so insane sound somehow more credible. It was funny how, despite a lifetime diet of science fiction movies, books, and TV shows with that exact theme, I was still resistant to the concrete reality of the idea.

"I've travelled back in time," I repeated, slightly louder this time and with more confidence, letting go of the door knob so that I could turn and face the mirror. At this point, any desire to repeat the phrase flew out of my mind at what I saw in the reflection. It was me, well... kind of. It was the me that I remembered. The me that I saw in the few remaining pictures that I still had of my youth. A teenaged version of my form, with a single chin, a ton of hair, a face covered in tiny swollen red marks, and an overall physique with an enviable body fat percentage.

Seriously. When had I ever been this skinny?

For the longest time, I just stared at myself in the bathroom mirror of my childhood home, as if seeing myself like this made the entire fantastic experience that much more convincing. Admittedly, I had actually been getting swept away by the fantasy earlier when I'd been eating breakfast in the kitchen of the house that I had grown up in, with two people I still missed dearly, I completely forgot to be skeptical about any of it, and just accepted it as real for no other reason than I wanted it to be that way.

But now, well, this familiar-looking, acne riddled stranger smirking back at me from my own reflection, reminded me that I had some tough choices to make.

In the first place, just what the hell am I supposed to do? Not just about the shower, but for the rest of the day. At school.

Well, what were my options, really?

Was there anything wrong with me just throwing caution to the wind and actually going to school? I mean, this whole time-displacement thing could end at any moment, so couldn't I just enjoy it while it lasted?

Can't I just play along?

Chuckling to myself, I realized that, if this experience actually _did_ continue for any length of time, I wouldn't really have a choice _but_ to do just that, and the main reason as to why was literally staring me right in face.

The reflection I was gawking at even now was the perfect reminder that, to the rest of the world, I was a seventeen-year-old boy. I really wanted to say that it was actually the reflection of a young man, but the sixty-seven-year-old soul inside me knew better. _I was a boy_. A boy who couldn't easily buck the system. I had limitations—even more limitations that had been imposed on me in the _Pucks_. If I tried to step away from any of the standard conventions that limited a seventeen-year old's freedom, like school for instance, then the consequences would be just as real as everything else I was experiencing at the moment.

I'm a boy.

A boy with no real resources to speak of that were solely his. I would have a bank account but, if memory served, it would barely be enough money to get me to Toronto. Sure, I could steal a credit card. Maybe "borrow" a vehicle. Try and make it on my own. But then what? How long could I get by? Where would I go? Yeah, maybe I could use my knowledge of the future to my advantage, but I could do that from here just as easily. Probably even more easily.

And then there was the impact on others that I had been thinking of just earlier, especially in relation to my mother and father. If that really was them downstairs, and I really _had_ travelled in time, then I simply could not do anything that might hurt them or cause them any level of stress, and running away from home punched hard on all of those buttons.

My internal soliloquy was interrupted abruptly by a knock on the door and Dad's gruff voice asking me to hurry up. "What are you doin' in there anyways? There are others who use that washroom occasionally too y'know!"

I answered him while pretending that my mouth was full of toothpaste. "Just brushen my teef!" I said loudly, even as I scrambled to find my toothbrush. I remembered enough to look for it at the holder to the right of the sink, but there were four brushes hanging there beside the plastic Tupperware cup that we collectively used to rinse our mouths. Mom and Dad's brushes were pretty obvious, leaving only two and, since that made it a fifty/fifty chance either way, I grabbed the one closest to me and then set about locating the toothpaste.

As I brushed my teeth, I continued my internal contemplation.

Can I tell somebody that I'm a time-traveler?

Well, in the first place, who would believe me? Unless I could find a way to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but what would I even say?

I began to think about just how such a conversation would go with my parents, and I started to laugh to myself as I came to see its inherent role reversal. Like many of my friends, I'd grown up in a generation when our elders went on at great length about just how arduous had been their pasts compared to our, generally rather cushy, present. They were forever complaining about such things as how far they had to walk to school, or how they had to make do with nothing during the hard times of either the depression or the World Wars.

And here I was in the unique position of genuinely being able to make the claim to one of my elders that my past had been just as grim and challenging as theirs had been, perhaps even more so, even though, strictly speaking, it hadn't even officially happened yet.

You had to laugh. What else could you do?

When I was done with my teeth, I rinsed what I hoped had been my toothbrush, stripped out of my night-clothes, and stepped into the shower. It took a moment to figure out how to operate the faucet and direct the stream to the showerhead, but once the water hit me, I was inundated with another sense that convinced me even more deeply that this could not possibly be some kind of illusion, or dream, or advanced holodeck simulation. It was the smell of the water, the same earthy smell I remembered from my childhood. It was water with a taste, texture, and smell that was unique to Northern Ontario and it made me teary eyed as the scent filled my nostrils. How could that level of detail be replicated? Had I ever had a dream so vivid that I could smell something this strongly?

As I was shampooing my head (while mentally agreeing with my father that this was way too much hair) and trying to remember exactly how to use conditioner, I began to contemplate some popular movies and stories concerning time-travel, since that was where most of my knowledge on the subject seemed to originate.

Will time flow normally from today forward?

Could I find myself jumping around in time like the main character in _The Time Traveler's Wife_ , or like Captain Picard in the series finale of _Star Trek: The Next Generation?_ Alternatively, what if I kept repeating the same day over and over again like Bill Murray's character in _Groundhog Day?_ Both of these questions were pretty easy to dismiss from further contemplation though, since I wouldn't notice either of those effects until they actually started happening to me.

Could this time-travel trip end at any minute, returning my mind to my proper period?

If memory served, in the movie _Somewhere in Time_ , that's pretty much what happened to Christopher Reeve's character when he saw an anachronistic artifact—something that didn't belong in the past there with him—that broke his hypnotic link to that era. I hadn't seen any such anachronisms yet, but I made a mental note to watch out for them. Still, like the previous question, the answer to this was something I couldn't possibly find until it, too, actually happened.

Could I make changes to the future if I did things differently in the past?

There were so many examples of stories and movies where the protagonist is given the opportunity to go back in time to a pivotal moment and change the future for the better. A good example of this would be _Quantum Leap_ , where Sam Beckett "leaps" through time and into a different body in every episode in order to right a wrong that had been done historically. Then there was CBCs _Being Erica_ , one of my favourites from the 2010s, where Erica Strange walked through a doorway into her past every week and tried to make better choices for herself. In both cases though, none of the changes that either characters made, although significant, ever seemed to alter the present all that much, at least not nearly as much as had killing a single butterfly in Ray Bradbury's seminal time-travel short-story, _The Butterfly Effect_. In fact, almost every other time travel movie or story that I could think of, from _Back to the Future_ to the _Star Trek_ episode _City on the Edge of Forever,_ involved the heroes trying to mitigate the damage that their own time-traveling had wrought in the first place.

This segued quite nicely into my next question.

Can I get back to my own time?

I had mixed feelings about this one. 2035 wasn't anywhere near a utopia worth returning to, and although I most definitely missed my children and Celeste, I'd resigned myself to never see them again anyhow when I'd escaped the _Pucks_ in my search to find out...

My thoughts were interrupted by a hard rap on the door and a loud reminder from my father that I'd been taking too long. "If it takes this long to wash your hair, then it's definitely time to consider cutting it," he added in a voice that faded as he walked away down the hall.

I shut off the water immediately and had to admit that, with wet strands of hair hanging down past my nose, my father wasn't wrong about it being too long. Still, I hadn't had hair in decades, and I just really wanted to enjoy the hell out of it. Maybe I'd even get it dyed or styled or something, simply because I could.

I grabbed a towel (after finally remembering where they were stored), wrapped it around myself (amazed at the fact that it reached all the way around me comfortably), and zipped out of the bathroom and down the hallway to my room.

After all the contemplation about time travel that I'd just done, the only real solution that I had arrived at, other than that I should just act out my part for now, was that, if my current experience actually were a book, or a movie, or a TV show, then it certainly wasn't all that original was it? It seemed to me that it had all been done before.

I began to crave something at that point - something that I knew would be off limits to my seventeen-year-old body: coffee.

back to top

# Chapter 2

## Back to School

Back in my room after my shower, I was standing in the middle of the room, towel still wrapped around me, spinning in place. I was like a deer in headlights, enraptured by everything around me, looking at it as if I'd never seen it before.

The walls were that faux-panelling style that was all the rage in the 70s, but you could barely see any of it since every square inch of it seemed to be covered by one kind of pop-culture memorabilia or another (all of it attached with father-approved thumbtacks, since tape would damage the fake wood design easily).

There was the _E.T._ poster with the diagonal crease that had happened when it had been bent almost in half just twenty minutes after I'd bought it when I had jumped out of the way of an Ottawa transit bus that had gotten too close to the sidewalk. Then there was the classic _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ poster by Amsel that looked like a monochromatic sketch on a tan background, the one I'd stared at for hours as a youth while trying to figure out how to replicate the drawing style.

There were also quite a few smaller pictures and pin-ups, like a star chart, a world map identifying all the places I had wanted to visit (but never actually had), and a portrait of the _Greatest American Hero_ with William Katt as Ralph Hinkley in his red super-suit flexing his non-existent bicep.

Then, dwarfing the rest of them, were three of my prized possessions: an authentic theatrical poster from each of the original trilogy _Star Wars_ films that I'd bought from the guy who owned my hometown theater at the end of each film's local run. I smiled ruefully as I stared at the still-creased pieces of paper remembering how, just when these posters were starting to be worth something, Clay—my one-time best friend and roommate when I lived in Toronto—would sell them without me knowing for drug money.

The feelings that were flowing through me were admittedly at odds. As I looked up at the posters and remembered the betrayal they represented, it made me angry at first, but this was followed almost immediately by confusion when I realized that I was getting upset about something that, from my current perspective, hadn't even actually happened yet.

So, I moved on, shifting my drifting gaze enough so that I was now looking at my old desk, the sturdy kind that every teacher used in the 60s and 70s, the kind with a thick, solid-oak surface and three sturdy drawers to the right of the opening where your knees went. There had been drawers to the left too at one point, but my father had cut them off in order to fit it in my room.

Resting on top of the desk, against the back wall where it was out of the way, was my beat-up old tape deck piled high with cassette tapes, some of them actually in their cases. Beside this sat my beloved Commodore 64, with its huge monitor directly behind it, and a monster dot-matrix printer on a make-shift shelf attached to the wall to the right.

Behind and above the desk, there was a corkboard that was mostly covered with pictures, notes, and newspaper clippings. Then, hanging high above it all, were a few large models of the _Enterprise_ , _Millennium Falcon_ , and the _Battlestar Galactica_ , arranged to look like they were heading off on the adventure together, just like my friends and I had always talked and written about, long before such homemade stories became called "fan fiction."

Finally pulling myself away from the room survey, I went to the closet to find something to wear for the day. Inside, I saw a bunch of shirts hanging there that I barely remembered, along with a bunch of extraordinarily thin ties suspended from a hanger that I'd bent into a rudimentary hook. Although I was relieved to find clothing that hadn't been influenced by _Miami Vice_ , there was still a little too much pastel for my current taste, a taste that could best be described, I decided with a wry grin, as "futuristic."

Eventually, I slipped on a basic red t-shirt and covered it with a black and white plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. For pants, I decided on the pair of jeans that I found on the floor at the foot of the bed, even though they had clearly been worn the day before. Once I'd slid them on and buckled them up, I checked the pockets and I found a few coins (all dated appropriately), a set of keys (although I couldn't remember what they were for), as well as a familiar looking wallet with a few pieces of ID and a single ten-dollar bill.

According to my clock radio (currently playing _Careless Whisper_ by Wham!), it was almost 8 AM. I couldn't recall what time the bus usually picked us up, but since my father hadn't been yelling of late and Patrick still hadn't made an appearance, I could only assume that I still had time.

_OK,_ I wondered, standing the middle of my bedroom and looking around at a room that was rapidly becoming comfortable again. _What next? What about books?_

I finally located my school bag it under my desk. Perhaps predictably, the bag was the same kind of red and blue Adidas athletic tote bag that The Barenaked Ladies would immortalize in the late 90s in a song called _Grade 9,_ a nostalgic recreation of a high school experience that would be roughly contemporaneous to my current temporal venue.

As I dropped the bag on my chair and zipped it open, it occurred to me that I could have figured out today's date simply by looking at the class notes that were in the binders inside of it. I took a quick mental inventory of the objects inside the sack, such as a pencil case, a math kit, an agenda that I'd fashioned out of a small notepad, a box of pencil crayons, and what might have been a chocolate bar, before pulling out my old binder.

The first thing I noticed upon flipping the binder open was a plastic sleeve that conveniently held my schedule, a tabular graph with each time period clearly marked and colour-coded, although I had no memory of what each colour signified, or what the little triangles in the corners of the cells meant. Thankfully, the schedule listed the room numbers for each class, although it completely failed to list my actual grade-level this year.

I rifled through the papers and notes looking for a mention of this fact, but eventually had to conclude that it probably wasn't listed because it was assumed that I should already know what grade I was in, so there was no point spelling it out. My best guess was that it was tenth grade, but that was a fuzzy estimate since I couldn't remember exactly how ages corresponded to grades in this time period, mostly because school conventions changed completely after the events of 2025. I had just begun to mentally chart out a table of school grades in relation to my birthday, when I could hear my father's voice in the hallway complaining loudly to Mom that we were both going to miss the geedee bus, and if we did, then he was going to drive slowly behind each of us to make sure that we walked the whole way to school.

Chuckling at what even my original seventeen-year-old self would have known was an empty threat, I threw everything into my bag, hoping that I wasn't forgetting anything, and managed to quietly slip past my father and down the stairs when he was looking the other way.

Not a minute later, and right on schedule, I could hear my brother Patrick explode out of his bedroom and sprint down the stairs with my father trailing right after him, haranguing him with each step. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dad stop short when he saw me sitting at the table beside my mother, innocently looking through the contents of the lunch bag that she had prepared for me. I glanced up at the two of them, prepared to look smug, but froze when I saw my brother.

I think my father was still speaking, but I wasn't paying him any attention, because I was too busy staring at Patrick. This was the first that I'd seen him since my unexpected arrival in the past this morning and I was momentarily taken aback by his size. Hell, I grew up with the guy, yet I had still somehow managed to forget just how tall and broad he was in comparison to the rest of the family, even at the still-tender age of nineteen. Not surprisingly, his unusual size—especially in comparison to mine—had led to a lot of good-natured ribbing over the years from people wondering who his real father had been. In fact, several years from now, the two of us would team up for an anniversary card for our parents and position ourselves to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in their classic movie-poster pose from the movie _Twins_.

Patrick had the classic build of a football player, which was all the more ironic considering that our high school didn't actually have a football team. I never knew all the details, but the whole sport been cancelled in the entire Northern Ontario region a few years before I'd gotten to high school after some kind of tragic accident at a tournament or something. Patrick had been disappointed, to be sure, but it didn't hold him back. He was the kind of natural athlete that did well in pretty much any sport.

Patrick saw me staring at him as he pulled a couple of bananas off the bunch on the counter. "What?" he asked, an unspoken challenge clear in his voice. "Were these bananas part of one of your geeky science experiments?"

Unfortunately, my relationship with my brother had never been what you could call _easy_. Oh, sure it was cordial, but where my interests ran more intellectual, my brother's were clearly the opposite, and he was currently on track for what would turn out to be a very bright future in professional sports before he eventually shifted into a career as a firefighter for the city of Ottawa.

In his youth though, Patrick had been a jock through and through, and had not always been that kind whenever he teased me about being a geek. Still, I knew better than most that underneath the bluster, there was a genuine heart of gold.

Of course, I wouldn't really see much of that golden heart until our late twenties when we finally were able to truly connect and get past years of sibling rivalry. It was then that he finally revealed that he'd resented me throughout most of our teen years because I was always outdoing him. What's more, he'd had a great reputation at high school until I came along grabbing all of the attention and the glory with my academic awards.

Perhaps worst of all though, he was justified in feeling that I had been aloof towards him in our teen years. I _had_ let my successes go to my head, and I _had_ been pretty judgemental of his lower grades. If he felt stupid around me, it was at least in part because I actively tried to make him feel that way.

The distant squeal of brakes from outside the house triggered some kind of latent memory in me, and I knew without needing confirmation that the bus was here. Patrick was already moving towards the door, grunting a goodbye to our parents. Gathering my Adidas bag, and slinging it over my left shoulder, I began following after him. As I passed Mom, I stopped quickly to hug her.

"Thanks for packing my lunch, Mom. I'm sure it will be as delicious as always," I said as I kissed her forehead. When I turned around, it was to see my father and brother staring at me. Apparently, this expression of appreciation was something else that was out of character for teenaged me.

"Suck-up," muttered Patrick so that only I could hear him, even as he called out over his shoulder, "Thanks for the lunch, Ma!" before pulling the front door open and sprinting out across the driveway towards the bus. He covered the distance quickly and even though I ran after him at a pace that was much faster than anything that I'd run in years, I was still left in his dust. By the time I'd climbed the stairs and nodded a good morning to the bus driver, Patrick had already settled into a seat about half-way down the long vehicle.

As I carefully moved down the aisle, not used to a bus that had row seating and that wasn't wholly dedicated to being used as a living space, I casually wondered again about what I was doing here back in time. If there was even a slight possibility that I could use it as an opportunity to fix past mistakes, I was going to start with my relationship with Patrick.

The way he stared at me after he reluctantly moved his legs to let me take the space by the window beside him, made it more than a little obvious that this was not a normal state of affairs.

"So," I began tentatively as Patrick shoved half a banana in his mouth and began chewing loudly. "How's it going eh?" I was pretty sure that _SCTV's_ Bob and Doug McKenzie were popular around this time period, and I seemed to recall that everyone was mimicking their speech patterns and Canuck-based expressions.

"Can I ask you a strange question?"

Patrick stopped chewing long enough so that a viscous thread of spittle escaped from the side of his mouth and slid slowly down the side of his chin. From the confused, quasi-belligerent expression on my brother's face, I was clearly violating some kind of communication protocol by attempting to engage him in conversation. How could he have known that, from my perspective, he and I hadn't actually seen each other in some fifteen years? How could he know that I dearly wanted to have one of our deep conversations, the kind we had standing vigil over my father's death bed when we both desperately needed to feel a strong connection with a family member while another member of that family was quietly slipping away. We'd waited decades to find out that there was more that connected us than held us apart.

How could Patrick know that I wanted to start that process of discovery earlier in our lives? Now that I'd inexplicably been given the opportunity to do so.

As the bus picked up speed and bounced its way down the road, Patrick finally grunted a non-committal response to my question, before immediately going back to chewing his banana, making it very clear that he wasn't open to a game of Q and A. So, I went in a different direction and made a few feeble attempts to get a conversation going, but each one of his responses was a little more remote than the last. Not that it mattered much by this point anyhow because, once the scenery began to change, my attention got pulled away entirely.

I was now staring out the window at my childhood hometown of Robertson, Ontario. The bus was just now in the process of passing out of the town's rural surroundings and into the regular system of streets, a division traditionally marked by the truck stop on the edge of town with a Canadian flag the size of an Olympic sized swimming pool flying from a pole that was at least three-stories tall. It was this flag, perhaps more than anything else, that made me realize that I was well and truly in my hometown because it had always been the first thing I had seen whenever I had been coming home, no matter what time of day or night.

When I was a kid, my father had turned this flag into a game that would signal an end to our road trips. When we had been approaching Robertson, driving home from wherever we'd been traveling together as a family, he'd have us all watching for the flag. The first person to spot it and call out "I see the maple leaf!" won a prize, which was never more than him running his fingers through our hair afterwards and saying "Good job." Those moments of praise and affection were, to this day, some of the sweetest prizes that I'd ever been awarded.

As we passed the gas station, I whispered wistfully out the window as tears began to flow, "I see the maple leaf, Dad. I'm home."

Patrick must have heard what I'd said and had likely noticed that I was crying, because he was looking at me with an expression I would come to know well years from now—one of genuine concern. My brother had never been one to ignore genuine distress. It was what would make him such a good firefighter, I suppose. As much as he had teased me as a child, he had also always been there with a joke or something equally distracting to lift my spirits when I was clearly distraught.

"What is it?" Patrick finally grunted, almost reluctantly. "What's your strange question?"

I sniffed a few times and wiped at my eyes before responding through a broad smile. "Actually, I don't have one yet. I just wanted to know that I could ask it when one finally occurs to me."

Despite himself, Patrick laughed. A quick snort of his nose accompanied by an almost imperceptible smile. "You really are a freak," he said, almost affectionately as he pulled a Sports magazine out of his bag and began thumbing through it, effectively signalling an end to all further conversation.

I didn't mind so much though. The ice had been broken, and that was enough for now. I just really wanted to get back to looking out the bus window at a town that I'd never thought to ever see again, much less as it was in 1985.

Robertson was a mining town in Northern Ontario, with a population of roughly five thousand, and located about an hour north-east of Timmins, and about eight long hours north of Toronto. It was originally a tiny trading outpost for the Hudson's Bay Company, being located where two large rivers merged into one before flowing into James Bay some three hundred kilometers to the north. The outpost had been pretty much completely abandoned in the mid-1800s until a huge silver deposit had been discovered close-by in the early 1900s, at which point it exploded into a full-fledged town almost overnight.

Robertson's biggest claim to fame, other than the silver mine that ultimately ran dry in the 1960s, was that it was named after an ancestor of the guy that invented the Robertson screw driver. At least that was one theory. I'd also heard that, way back, it was actually called Robertstown, named after Obadiah Roberts, the prospector who discovered the silver deposit, but was changed because of a clerical error on a legal document that was too expensive to redo.

And I was back in it. Back in Robertson.

Yet, to my chagrin, I wasn't getting a chance to see that much of it on this ride because the route that the bus took to get to school, although slightly circuitous, wasn't all that comprehensive. I could get a feel for the town now, with its dwarfish trees, and its single-storey structures and occasional row housing, but a thorough tour would have to wait until later, because a building that played such a large roll in my teenaged years was just now coming into sight.

The high school in my northern Ontario town of Robertson was a sprawling brick structure with a squat two stories and a student population of about five hundred, distributed over five grades from nine to thirteen (Ontario wouldn't eliminate the thirteenth grade until a few years after I'd graduated.) There was only one high school in Robertson, as the town really wasn't big enough for more than that. Like most of the communities in Northern Ontario, Robertson had a vibrant Franco-Ontario population, but it still wasn't quite big enough to support a dedicated French secondary school, so we had been grouped together into a single bilingual high school, making the small-town stereotype of everybody knowing everybody else even more pronounced. If all the kids didn't know each other directly, they at least knew _of_ each other. What's more, the teachers knew our parents, and in many cases, the teachers _were_ our parents. We couldn't get away with much, although we certainly tried. Well, some of us anyhow. Mostly my brother.

I had had some excellent times in this building, and met a few life-long friends along the way too.

And then there was Andi.

I sighed as I thought about my first love, Andi Petras. In Grade 11, she and I made it our mission to explore every nook, cranny, or hidden area of the high school for tender moments that seemed to last forever no matter how briefly they might actually have been.

Andi had been equal parts smarts and passion, two things that had fueled her rebellious nature and headstrong attitude, something she had always claimed was owing to her Greek heritage. Her unique name was actually an abbreviation of the much longer and more traditional one that her parents had given her, one that she hated so much that she hadn't even told me what it was until we'd been seriously dating for well over a year.

At the same time, she revealed that she had actually been in the process of defying her parents by changing it legally, because the abbreviation was too much of a boy's name. But then she had seen _The Goonies,_ and had been introduced to Kerri Green's character "Andy," and suddenly, she hadn't felt so alone anymore.

Truth be told, I was relieved that I wasn't going to be running into Andi today, because her family didn't move up north until the beginning of Grade 11. As much as I'd have loved to see her again, she'd be a lot to handle right now with everything else that I'll have to adjust to, both today and beyond (if this time-slip thing persists, that is.)

The school bus had come to a stop in front of the school in a line with four or five other buses, and the kids were all clamouring to stand up to be the first off. Patrick waited until everyone else had moved out of the way before easing his muscular bulk into the aisle. Pulling my Adidas bag from the floor, I followed after him.

The last one off the bus, I could hear the doors hiss shut behind me as I took a step onto the school's lawn and stared at the red-brick building in front of me. Patrick had stopped to wait for me, as if sensing that I was out of sorts today. For a moment, it seemed like he was going to walk with me, until somebody in the group of sports-jersey clad jocks by the nearby student parking lot called out to him. My brother narrowed his eyes at me searchingly, before punching me solidly on the shoulder and striding away.

"Keep your honey-stick in your pants," he said to me over his shoulder, before adding, "Geek."

With Patrick gone, I took a few tentative steps away from the bus, after making a mental note of the route number beneath the big side mirror so that I knew which one to board at the end of the day. All around me, dozens and dozens of excited teenagers, many of whom I could just barely recognize, were streaming across the grass aiming for a handful of school entrances. I merged with the moving throng as I watched Patrick join up with his hockey buddies and lumber off collectively towards a group of girls, one of whom I recognized from a distance as his long-time girlfriend, Monique (she was actually his beard, but I wouldn't know this for another couple of years). I hadn't expected to rely on Patrick today, but I did feel a little vulnerable without him with the rush of nostalgic feelings making me feeling a little more sentimental than usual. If I wasn't careful, the teens around me would smell my fear, and turn into the pack of uncivilized animals that they were always on the brink of becoming.

Anybody watching me walk through the doors to my old high school must have thought that I looked like a tourist or something, the way my head was zipping around looking at everything as if for the first time. With the pressure of so many of us streaming through the metal fire doors and into the school, I couldn't stop and look and touch as much as I wanted to. When I finally entered the main hall—the one that was lined on one side by large windows and the other side by lockers and classrooms—my first reaction was that the place seemed _tiny_. Far too small to have been the same hallways from my memory. Far too small to have occupied that much space in my mind all these years.

Clearly, my first, and perhaps biggest challenge today would be remembering where my locker was and what its combination was. I had been here for five years of high school. That meant that I had been in at least five different lockers, not including the number of times that I'd moved without asking permission. I could find no mention of either in my binder, nor hidden anywhere in the Adidas bag that I was currently wearing like so many other students were, as a backpack.

Where the hell had my locker been in Grade 10?

With every step closer to a problem for which I had no potential solution, I kept thinking back to Oskar's philosophy on life. We'd spent hours in his makeshift bar in the Pucks exchanging stories and viewpoints, and he had definitely impressed me with his ideas that staying in the moment in any situation and looking for both opportunities and inspiration was the best way to live. He even had a computer animation playing on a loop on an old iPad on the wall behind the bar that showed a wise old monk leaping into the sky, seemingly at nothing, before miraculously landing on a cloud that supported his weight long enough until he could leap again into the void, where he'd conveniently find another cloud. Oskar told me that the animation represented the ultimate leap of faith. That each time that monk jumped, he wasn't jumping _towards_ an existing cloud, he was jumping knowing without a doubt that one would be there just when it was needed.

I may have scoffed at the idea initially when he told it to me, but after several years of it being reinforced, usually with copious amounts of bitter tasting alcohol, I began to see it working in my own life, and his too. I mean, how the hell else could you explain the microbus appearing when it did?

So, here I was, walking into my old high school, fully present, and full of the faith that the very thing that I needed would appear to me just when I needed it the most.

And that's when it hit me: I didn't have to wander around aimlessly trying to figure out where I belonged, I already knew where I belonged.

I'm not really sure how it started, but sometime in my second year, those of us who didn't quite fit with the "in" crowd because of our mutual love of everything that wasn't mainstream in the 80s (like science fiction, or comics, or video games, or Dungeons and Dragons, to name a select few) started meeting before and between classes in front of a large window on the second floor. We'd exchange ideas, trade comics, get excited about upcoming movies, or even re-enact the plotlines of genre television programs that some of us may have missed the night before (this was in the days before it became commonplace to record television shows on video tape or, later, TiVo and PVR).

This area was where I'd finally heard all about what had happened in the pilot episode of _The Greatest American Hero_ , how Indiana Jones had known to keep his eyes closed during the climax of _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ , or even how he'd hitched a ride on the outside of a submarine, and it's where I'd first been told about a little upcoming movie named _E.T_.

Eventually, this meeting area became known as _geek window_ , and us geeks had it to all to ourselves, not because we discouraged others from joining us, but mostly because nobody wanted to be associated with the likes of us. It was a lot like the couch in the _Central Perk_ coffee shop on _Friends_ in that everyone knew it was our spot and to stay away from it.

As I exited the stairwell that emptied onto the school's second floor and turned down the hallway that led to geek window _,_ I could see that there was a group of about a half dozen kids already gathered there listening intently to something that Calvin Ferguson was saying. I smiled when I saw Calvin. It's not so much that I'd forgotten about him, it's just that I hadn't actually thought about him in years. He was our unofficial nerd King, a position that was well-deserved because he was most assuredly the most passionate and unapologetic geek that I'd ever had the pleasure of knowing.

He was currently talking about something that had him so excited that, even from halfway down the hallway, I could see his arms waving animatedly. I wasn't the only one who noticed him either. A couple of dudes were walking beside me and speaking loudly enough for me to hear one of them refer derisively to Calvin and my friends gathered around him as "Fucking fairy-tale freaks."

I really wanted to both praise the guy on his clever alliteration as well as to correct him by pointing out that, strictly speaking, they were actually fans of fantasy and science fiction and _not_ fairy-tales, but I was pretty sure that such distinctions were beyond his pay grade.

More importantly though, the dude's derogatory comments made me want to tell all of my geek friends not to let idiots like this Neanderthal get to them, because there would be a day in about twenty-five years when being a bona fide geek would become something to aspire to. That's when superhero movies would become all the rage, and books like _Harry Potter_ and _Game of Thrones_ would dominate, and all of the popular kids that shunned and mocked nerds like us in high school would suddenly embrace our culture and start claiming on social media that they too had always been geeks at heart.

Especially women.

This was something that had always confused me. Around about the 2010s, at the peak of geek culture, I started having conversations online with some of the girls that I'd known in high school and, suddenly, they were quoting my favourite movies and TV shows, or telling me about the books we had in common, or sharing their theories on how Boba Fett might have escaped the Sarlacc pit, or how they'd cried during the lighting of the beacons in the third _Lord of the Rings_ movie, _Return of the King._ When I had asked these women how long they'd been interested in geek culture, they claimed that they had always been nerds, even in high school!

But, here I was, back in the hallways of that very high school, and I was looking at incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. The group currently gathered in front of geek window was exclusively male, just as it always had been, and just as it always would be. Right now, in 1985, geeks were still girl-kryptonite, and being seen associating with one was clique suicide.

I'd almost reached the window by now, but was slowed by the throng of kids bunching up where two hallways intersected. As I brushed by so many people, I found myself wondering, for the briefest of moments, if perhaps I wasn't the only one who had mysteriously slipped through time last night. I began to search faces for others, like myself, who might not belong here. Somebody looking lost, or confused, or over-nostalgic. I hadn't been looking very long when, soberly, I realized that I very likely had to have been the only one to have shifted in time from 2035, for the simple reason that pretty much every single person I was looking at in this school would be dead in some forty years.

For just a few seconds, despite being surrounded by dozens of other people, I felt completely alone. Sighing, I pushed through the last of the crowd and walked over to stand beside Calvin, who was, even now, making it more than a little obvious that he was NOT a time-traveler.

"...heard it from my cousin in Sudbury," he was saying to a chorus of impressed oooooo's from kids who were clearly under the impression that Sudbury was the 'big city,' and everyone who lived there was so much more in the know than those of us who lived in the backwater of Robertson. "Hey Josh," he said parenthetically to me before continuing. "So anyway, he has it on good authority that George Lucas wants to go back and film the first three _Star Wars_ stories... (there was a loud chorus of murmurs at this, but Calvin ignored them all in favour of pushing through to the next part of his news)...maybe even continue Luke, Leia, and Han's story in the next three chapters, and—this is the best part—it's gonna happen soon. Like in the next few years."

It was all I could do to suppress a laugh at how far off his projection was, and the fact that everyone else in the group was reacting with excitement to what he was saying led me to suspect that none of them knew what I did, and this meant that none of them were likely fellow time-travelers either. While the others were expressing their delight at the news, one of the youngest members of the group (whose name I just couldn't quite recall) made the mistake of asking out loud, "The first three?"

Immediately, everyone stopped talking. I hadn't seen Calvin in years, but nonetheless I joined everyone else in wincing at the tirade that this innocent comment was bound to evoke from our King who thought that everyone who hung out at geek window should already be aware of the most well-known parts of _Star Wars_ trivia. Calvin surprised us though, and very calmly replied, "When Lucas had first begun to write _Star Wars_ , he realized very early on that he had way too much material for one movie, so he split it all up, eventually sketching out nine in total. Then, when it came time to make the first movie, he decided to start with the fourth episode in the story, since, at the time, there was no guarantee he'd be able to make more than one movie. He figured that Episode four, more than any of the others, could stand on its own if it had to."

As the kid was asking more questions about what happened in the first three episodes (nobody knew yet that such a thing was called a "prequel"), and just as Calvin was telling him about how Obi-Wan had apparently defeated Anakin Skywalker and left him for dead in the volcanic sith pits, which is what turned him into Darth Vader, I was abruptly distracted by a pair of hands suddenly blocking my eyes and a voice beside my ear saying "Guess who?"

Seriously? Today of all days?

I decided not to even play the game, so I playfully grabbed the hands and moved them from my eyes and spun around. I was about to say "Hey you," to whomever had been familiar enough to play this guessing game with me, only to find my mouth unable to function due to the sudden application of a pair of lips that appeared to belong to a young, dark-haired girl.

I froze right up, but she didn't seem to notice. Eventually, she stopped kissing me and pulled me into a hug. "I've missed you," she said.

Andi.

Wait. What? Andi!?

Oh shit.

"Andi!" I blurted without thinking. "What are you doing here?"

"I should ask you the same, Mister," she replied good-naturedly. "We were supposed to meet at my locker this morning, remember?"

I blinked a few times as the obvious occurred to me. Unless Andi was a temporal anachronism, this was Grade 11.

If Andi noticed how stiff I was or that I wasn't exactly returning her hug, she didn't say anything. Instead, she whispered quietly into my ear so that only I could hear her, "Hey babe, wanna make _in_ at lunch? My parents are still down in Toronto."

_Oh My God._ I'd completely forgotten about the very unfortunate expression that I'd made up in my teens. Basically, _making in_ was just like _making out_ , but it involved getting _in_ side of each other's clothing.

_I know what you're thinking_ , I thought in my best Magnum P.I. voice, _I was a real Hemingway with the way I could turn a phrase back then._

Frantically, I did the math in my head, adjusting now for the fact that I had been off by a year in my earlier estimation as to what grade I was in back in 1985. It was April. This meant that the Petras family had just moved to Robertson from the Danforth area of Toronto the previous August (although she and her parents still travelled there often to visit family, which is where Andi had obviously just returned from on her own). Andi and I had met the previous Autumn, become very good friends, with our relationship finally becoming self-aware in February when we'd fallen off a ski-doo together into a snowbank with her on top of me, and we'd just started kissing. That meant that she and I had been dating for what, about two months? We'd just started getting physical, mostly by sneaking over to her house at lunch while her parents were away or at work.

When I hadn't responded to her proposition, she eventually stepped back and glared at me suspiciously, giving me my first really good look at her.

Fuck. Had she ever been that young?

I blinked back at her, even though I knew that I had to respond soon but... well, she was just so goddamned young! Sure, we were the same age bodily, but mentally, I had every single person in this school beat in that regard. Even the ancient English teacher Mrs. Cloutier, who retired (or rather, was about to retire) at the tender age of something like 64. To make matters worse, strictly speaking, I was still married, kind of, and it would feel like I was cheating on Celeste. I had to find a way...

"Josh?" Andi said, concern finally creeping onto features that had never in my memory shown anything else besides geniality and affability.

In response, I did the only thing I could think of doing, and I just kissed her. It was the only way that I could buy enough time to figure out how to rebuff her offer but also soften the rejection enough so as not to insult her. It was a slow, lingering kiss, mostly because I needed that much time to think.

From the unfocused look in her eyes as I pulled away afterwards, I had to assume the desperate ploy to distract her had worked, thanks in large part to the fact that, since I'd last locked lips with this young woman, I'd literally had decades to practice kissing and, at one point, had even had a most excellent teacher. Her name had been Heather, and we had dated off and on in University for a couple of years.

When we had first gotten together during Frosh week though, she'd told me in no uncertain terms that I had no idea how to use my lips, so she took it upon herself to teach me "for the sake of your future lovers" (which was ironic since she actually became one of those future lovers when we met again in Toronto a few years after we'd graduated, and had gotten married shortly thereafter).

But, during those first few weeks of University, with Heather as my new teacher, I had been a very enthusiastic student. And, from the dreamy look on Andi's face now (not unlike the look on Lois Lane's face after Clark kissed her in _Superman II_ and magically modified her memory to make her forget that he was Superman) and the fact that her mouth was still hanging open, my lessons with Heather had indeed paid off.

"Hi Andi," I said warmly, having finally found the words to speak to her, as well as a plausible excuse for not going over to her house at lunch. "I'm so sorry, but... well, I can't come over today. I have to practice my,... um, music. Rain check?... Please?"

In response, Andi blinked weakly a few times, and then smiled. "Um, sure," she finally said as she leaned in closer for a hug. "But only if you promise to kiss me like that again."

Thank heavens she didn't ask how it was that I suddenly knew how to kiss.

At the same time, we both noticed that the group gathered at geek window was no longer making any noise and neither was Calvin's voice sharing the prevailing _Star Wars_ theories of the day. Andi and I broke out of our hug and looked over to find that every single one of the boys were staring at us wide-eyed, clearly not used to such overt displays of affection in a high school corridor.

Andi giggled at the attention, the fugue brought on by my kiss having finally dissipated, before grabbing my hand, and pulling me down the hall and away from our appreciative audience. As we walked away, I could hear Calvin calling after me, so I turned back towards him even as I tried to keep up with Andi.

"Hey Donegal," Calvin said loudly so he could be heard over the sea of chatting kids all around us. "It's your turn to host next week, right?"

The blank look on my face hadn't lingered very long before he realized that I had no idea of which he spoke, so he immediately followed up with, "...for the next Video Recital. I've got _Blade Runner_ , and I've been practicing!"

"The Director's Cut?" I asked without thinking. That took the smile off his mouth as he looked at me dumbly in response. I could barely hear him calling out, "What's a director's cut" as Andi pulled me away through the throng of students. "You and your geek friends," she said affectionately as she rolled her eyes. "What's a Video Recital again?"

"Um," I answered hesitantly because the answer was quite frankly coming back to me just as quickly as I was delivering it to Andi.

"It's a video party where we, uh, play popular science fiction movies," I began to explain even as I smiled bittersweetly to myself. In the future, I'd told my kids about the video party phenomenon a number of times. It had become my generation's version of the tired old "you kids don't appreciate how hard things were when I was your age" story. I had tried to tell them that they didn't know how lucky they were to be able to pull up pretty much whatever movie they wanted at any time they wanted, on whatever hand-held device they wanted. Because, "in my day", I had told them, the only way to watch a movie was when it was scheduled to be shown, either in a theater or on TV. And you had to take what was offered too, since there was no such thing like being able to make a movie request like you could with radio stations for songs.

This all changed when video stores came along and rented out movies on video tape. The only problem though, at least in the beginning, was that the machines on which to play these video tapes were very expensive to own, but you could rent them for short periods, so that's where the idea of video parties came from. This was when we'd pool our money and rent a VCR video machine for a weekend, along with a whole bunch of movies, and invite a big group of friends over to stay up late together and watch them all one after the other, along with a small country's GDP worth of soda pop, chips, and popcorn.

By 1985 though, most of our families owned VCRs, but it was still fun to get together as a group to catch the latest releases anyhow. I knew that Andi was familiar with the concept of the video party, but what I was trying to explain to her now was that, because my geek friends and I had seen all our favourite movies multiple times over, we put a twist on the video party convention by turning it into a _recital_.

"While we watch the movies, well... we call out the dialogue in time with the... um, actors. We watch three movies at a time, and the guy who knows the most dialogue wins the, um, crown. It's best two out of three."

Andi laughed, but not derisively. "Sounds like fun," she said. "Are girls allowed?"

"Well... I can't remember. I don't think we ever had a girl who actually _wanted_ to come."

"It's a good thing I'm babysitting then," she said. "Otherwise I might come and challenge you all to do a John Hughes film instead."

I laughed at the image of my high school geek friends being in the same room as an attractive young woman like Andi. "They wouldn't be able to speak. A smart and gorgeous girl like you would definitely have the advantage."

Andi looked at me funny, as if this kind of compliment was unusual for me, then the moment passed and she asked, "You guys have an actual crown?"

"Yeah, it's the inside straps from a hard hat; the part that tightens around your head. Calvin Krazy-glued a couple of action figures around the top, and each winner gets to write his name and date when he won it in black Sharpie, and he gets to keep it until the next party. Kinda like the Stanley Cup. It, well, um, it gives whoever has it special magical powers at our Dungeons and Dragons games too." I made a mental note to check and see if I had the crown at home before the next video party. Ironically, although I didn't know where it was right now, I did recall that I ended up with the crown after high school (after my triumphant recitation on our celebratory final recital of _Back to the Future_ , _Wrath of Khan_ , and _Raiders of the Lost Ark,_ during which it seemed like, even to me, that I had been channelling the movies) and had even gone so far as to build a glass display case for it.

The whole time that we'd been talking I'd been letting Andi lead the way to my locker since I had no precise idea where it was until we got close enough for it to finally come back to me.

"Oh," Andi continued. "Are we still on for Saturday night? Phoebe and Brock want us to confirm."

Inwardly, I groaned. Phoebe had been Andi's best friend when she'd lived in Toronto, before the Petras family had moved up north, and they'd kept in touch.

"Oh sure," I answered as enthusiastically as I could (the last thing I needed today was for Andi to get insecure about our relationship all of a sudden, especially since I'd just turned her down for a _make in_ session.) "Absolutely. I'd almost forgotten that she was in town," I lied.

"Yeah, her parents will be visiting my parents for a few days, and she thought it would be nice to have a double date. I told you all this already," a hint of irritation in her voice. "Remember. She's bringing her fiancé Brock to meet us."

Oh God.

Now it was all coming back to me. I remembered meeting the two of them when they were on this, their engagement tour, showing off a diamond ring the size of a baby's fist to all of Phoebe's old friends. If memory served, Phoebe was about a year older than Andi (who, like me, would have been seventeen now), and Brock was a few years older than that, and was the heir to some huge Canadian beer company or something, which made him practically royalty. They were both the epitome of yuppies, a term that I'm pretty sure hadn't even been invented yet.

The only thing more noteworthy about Brock, aside from the fact that he was quite shameless in showing off how rich he was, was the way in which he mangled the English language in an obvious effort to appear more macho. Even in the 80s, I was convinced that his whole act was nothing more than a transparent ploy to mask his evident homosexuality, something that I'm pretty sure was closeted only to him—and maybe Phoebe. In fact, it was something that was confirmed several years later when I ran into an adult Andi at a reunion, and she told me that Brock had finally left Phoebe and their kids for a man, and everybody was a lot happier as a result.

We had arrived by now at my locker, so I pretended that my arms were full (in anticipation of this ruse, I'd unslung the Adidas bag earlier, and had been surreptitiously grabbing books and things out of it as we walked). So, I asked Andi, "Would you mind, um, getting the lock? My hands are, um... full."

"Sure," she answered brightly to my great relief. I'd forgotten how much Andi loved opening my locker for me. For her, it was a form of intimacy that she knew my combination when nobody else did, and that she even had her own area on the makeshift shelf that I'd built above the locker's bottom so that there would be room for wet boots. In high school, these two aspects were akin to living together, even though it wasn't all that visible to the casual onlooker. If you _really_ wanted to advertise the fact that you were in a committed relationship in Northern Ontario in the 80s, you would sit right up beside each other on the bench seat of a pick-up truck like you were crowding the steering wheel, even when there was plenty of room closer to the passenger's side. Naturally, this led to more than a few pranks amongst the teenaged boys if ever there were three of them crammed into a truck. When the truck passed a group of people, the one by the passenger door would bend over to hide, thus making it look like the other two boys were sitting right up beside each other, and were, by extension, a couple.

As Andi spun the tiny dial on my combination lock, I watched carefully over her shoulder. The code that I watched the pointer land on felt familiar, but I repeated the numbers in my head a few times just to cement them in my memory anyhow. I was greatly relieved to have things work out so perfectly this morning in respect to access to my locker, because my only other option would have been to go to the office and ask to have my lock cut off, once I had been forced to admit that I didn't know where said locker was.

Thanks Oskar!

With the locker open, we didn't have much time to linger, because the crowds in the halls were obviously beginning to thin as students began to make their way to their respective home rooms. As if noticing this fact too, Andi excused herself, pulled me in for a quick kiss, and was off down the hallway a moment later saying, "See you in third period, Josh!"

"Um, Sure," I answered, waving weakly at her back. I had time to pull my binder out of my Adidas bag, hang it up in my locker (with one strap on each the coat hook on either side of the locker so that the bag was suspended just below the top shelf), close the locker and click the lock into place (upside down, I realized too late) and head off in the direction of the room whose number I'd thankfully noticed scrawled in the margins of my schedule this morning.

Entering my homeroom classroom as the national anthem was playing over the speakers, I was finally face to face with another challenge that I'd knew I'd be facing multiple times today: figuring out where I normally sat. Thankfully, there were only a handful of seats available, most of which were along the back row. I knew for a fact that I never sat all the way in the back (I was too much of a keener for that), so chose the only seat left in the front row.

As I sat down, I nodded at my home room teacher, remembering as I looked in his direction never to actually stare at him. Until I saw Alphonse Grenier, I'd all but forgotten about his distracting, and oh-so-obvious combover, and now it was all I could do not to squint at it wonderingly as I puzzled out (again) exactly how and why he styled it the way he did.

The kids in my school had debated long and hard over the years as to exactly what concoction Monsieur Grenier used to secure the coiled strand of hair to his scalp, with our best guess being that it was equal parts motor oil and industrial-strength adhesive. Not that it mattered all that much in the end though because whatever it was had never actually worked all that well. Despite the poor man's best efforts over the course of the school day, his hair would inevitably (and frequently) fall out of place, eventually ending up as a snake-like clump of glistening hair that hung down at least as far as his shoulder.

True to form, whenever this happened, Monsieur Grenier never acknowledged it beyond mechanically coiling the hair back into place, before pulling a semi-translucent handkerchief from his suit pocket to wipe the oily goo from his fingers.

Personally, I'd never actually had a class with Grenier (I'm pretty sure he taught welding, which was surprising considering how much incendiary liquid his head was bathed in), which I always considered to be a good thing, because I was distracted enough by his head in my home room alone. Years later, when my own hair was rapidly receding, it was thanks to Grenier's ridiculous antics of trying to fool others into thinking that he still had hair, that I decided to forgo ego, and simply shave my entire head instead.

As Grenier took attendance, I was trying to remember when the man had retired. I was pretty sure that this would be his last year at the school because, if memory served, in next year's Christmas assembly one of my classmates will get himself in trouble with the administration for performing a sketch about a recently retired teacher who, dressed as an evil scientist and working in a basement chemistry lab, created a powerful epoxy to permanently glue his obvious toupee to the top of his head. The character then proceeded to get high from the fumes coming off his chemistry experiment and destroy his lab as he hallucinated that his former students were coming back to haunt him as demons.

Naturally, the student got into trouble for his performance, not for so obviously skewering Grenier, but instead for the drug references. It was because of that student that the school administration thereafter insisted on signing-off on all sketches and performances at school assemblies.

With the attendance and announcements finished, there were about five minutes left in homeroom so, for lack of anything better to do, I browsed through my agenda. My father had always taught me to only buy something when you couldn't make it yourself, and my agenda was certainly proof of that concept. It had started out as a small coil notepad that I had gone through and calendarized by splitting each page into two days, each of which was clearly labelled. In school, I had used it to keep track of milestones that were coming up, when homework was due, and what to expect in each subject.

Perhaps most amusingly, I had also jotted down a comment at the end of each day that best summarized something that I'd learned in the course of it. Titled simply the "PTOTD" (for Profound Thought Of The Day), the recorded observation was never more than a line or two. Skimming back a few weeks in the agenda, I read a few of the pithy observations, marvelling not only at how much they resembled tweets but mostly how they were neither particularly profound or thoughtful. Well, not to the mind of a sexagenarian anyhow. Still, they were an interesting insight into the psyche of a seventeen-year-old white male who didn't realize just how privileged his pasty ass was.

Putting the agenda aside, I scanned the list of today's upcoming classes in my binder, as I deliberated what to expect from today, a prospect that was all the more complicated now that Andi was back in the picture. Andi said that she'd see me in third period which, according to my schedule, was History. I chuckled as I thought about studying a topic like that as a time-traveler. If those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, can the same be said of a time-traveler who forgets that which, to everyone else, hasn't even happened yet? Would I be condemned to repeat it myself?

Now, how's that for a Profound Thought of the Day?

It was at this moment, that something occurred to me about a possible side-effect if this time-slip experience persists.

Will I start to forget my own past? Will I begin to forget the future?

I had no idea how this time displacement thing worked. Presumably, my future consciousness somehow installed itself into my past body and, in the process, superimposed itself over my existing consciousness. What had happened to that consciousness? Was it still around somewhere? Would it slowly start to reassert itself? Was it possible, the longer I spent in this particular timeline, that I would forget about my future because it no longer existed? Would things readjust?

I had no idea.

What's more, there were also stories about time-travel that I'd either read or watched in which the travellers eventually "disremembered" their former lives through some fail-safe mechanism in the universe as it healed itself after a disruption in the space-time continuum. If this were true, then it was entirely possible that, even within a few short weeks, the entire fifty years that I'd lived since I was back in 1985 the first time would feel like little more than a vaguely-remembered dream.

I could think of only one solution to this possibility: I was going to have to write things down. I was going to have to start a journal that, among other things, documented a history that hadn't actually happened yet.

back to top

# Chapter 3

## Excerpt from Josh's journal

I've never kept a journal before. Am I supposed to write it informally, or compose it like I'm writing a story—with punctuation and dialogue and everything like that?

I dunno, so what say I just start jotting stuff down and see where it takes me.

I'm using this journal to record details of the future as I remember them. I have no idea what in hell's going on with me, but I'm concerned that, if this time-displacement experience persists, my memories of everything might start to fade, so I feel that it's important to set them down before that happens.

By the way, if you're reading this without my permission, it's just a science-fiction themed story that I'm working on. If you've ever pissed me off, then there's a good chance that I've either named or based a character on you, so happy reading trying to figure out which one it is.

Oh yeah. SPOILERS. Nobody knows who River Song is yet, (hell, nobody knows what a "spoiler" is yet) but that word makes more sense if you can imagine her saying it.

Well, let's start with how I got here...

So, last Thursday morning, I woke up in my own past, awoken abruptly by music that even my slumbering mind knew was out of place.

Just to be clear, my temporal displacement wasn't immediately obvious to me, not by any stretch of the imagination. At first, as far as I had been concerned, I was still in the _Ensee_ cell that I'd been "invited" to move into a few weeks earlier. Which is why I found it odd that there was suddenly music in a room that I knew for a fact was devoid of electronic devices capable of broadcasting sound.

Then, there was the choice of music. Somehow, I found it highly unlikely that my captors were into 80s soft-pop, although I briefly entertained the idea that they were playing it to torture me, which would never have worked anyhow since I'd always preferred music that was slow and sentimental.

In any event, I pretended to be sleep anyhow, hoping that if my captors thought I was still unconscious, I could catch them talking to each other again. Maybe I could have learned something new. Maybe I could have finally found out if Casey had managed to transmit a message before they had...

I can't even finish writing that sentence without the risk of replaying the scene in my mind, again. What I had watched them do to the little guy was horrific. In fact, one of the things that had kept me going in the long hours in solitary confinement was the hope that maybe, just maybe, there'd be some kind of reckoning for Remmus and his ilk for what they had done, not just to Casey, but to all the others too. Funny how that's all a pipe dream now, eh? How can you possibly hold somebody accountable for heinous crimes that he hasn't even committed yet?

So, anyhow, after the music had woken me up, I had been focusing so hard on pretending to be asleep that it took me way too long to become aware of certain, oh let's call them, INCONSISTENCIES.

For one, once the song was over, a very jocular Disc Jockey announced that the tune had been REO Speedwagon's LATEST song: _Can't Fight This Feeling._ It was so new, he'd said, that this had been the first time he'd heard it, and he "loved, loved, LOVED it!"

"This song's gonna be huge," he had added. "Mebbe not Michael Jackson huge, but huge nonetheless."

At that point, curiosity got the better of me and I had decided to risk opening my eyes a little, at which point I was presented with the second inconsistency: I was looking up at the ceiling. This meant that, unless the laws of gravity had somehow repealed themselves while I had been unconscious, I had been sleeping on my back. This might not seem too unusual to most people, but you have to understand that as a heavy-set man pushing seventy, my mild to moderate sleep apnea hadn't let me sleep on my back for decades.

The third inconsistency presented itself to me when I tried to brush something off my forehead only to find out that it was hair, something else that hadn't been a part of my life for decades. Indeed, for the last thirty or forty years of my life I'd been completely bald—not including that time in my early forties when I'd heralded the beginning of my mid-life crisis by trying to grow a ridiculous looking pony-tail out of the back of my head with the scattered follicles that were still loyally clinging to it.

At this point, I gave up all pretense at feigning sleep, and sat bolt upright (something that almost caused me to tumble out of bed completely since there was much less of me to move than usual) to stare in bewilderment at what appeared to be my childhood bedroom.

The scene that greeted my eyes defied belief. It was the bedroom in which I'd grown up, just as I had remembered it having been in my teens, sometime in the 80s. There were the posters on the walls from genre movies like _E.T.,_ _Star Wars_ , and _Raiders of the Lost Ark_. And, across from my bed, there was a beat-up old desk with my Commodore 64 sitting on it, and hanging from the ceiling above that were models of my favourite starships. Then, in the far corner was an overflowing clothes-hamper that smelled, even from here, like a teenaged boy.

Despite what I was looking at, seeing was definitely not believing, at least at first. The first thing I did was to contemplate whether it was some kind of _Ensee_ trick.

First, I theorized fleetingly that they had simply put me into a room that looked exactly like my old bedroom, but I dismissed this possibility almost immediately. Even if the _Ensee_ could have known exactly what this room looked like some fifty years ago, how could you explain the position in which I had been sleeping, or the fact that I clearly now had a much smaller physique, or the hair that was, even now, hanging down in front of my eyes. No, this went beyond a cleverly built set. Wayyyyyy beyond. Like the _Twilight Zone_ beyond.

Secondly, I wondered if perhaps I was inside some kind of super-advanced OVUM simulacrum. That was pretty easy to dismiss though. All I had to do was pick up the Rubik's cube off the bedside table and give it a few spins. Even with haptic gloves, there was no way to replicate that kind of physical sensation, one that was both comfortable and familiar.

Next, I considered whether it was some kind of simulated reality like the Matrix or, more appropriate to the era I appeared to be in, Tron. Both of those movies had plots where real people were digitized and put inside a computer-generated simulation that couldn't be distinguished from reality.

The _Ensee_ certainly had access to all kinds of advanced technology, but that? And, even if they _could_ fool me like that, why bring me _here_? Why _this_ period of time? I could understand them putting me in a familiar environment where I might let my guard down and tell them what they wanted to know, but why go through such an elaborate ruse to make me think I was back in my childhood bedroom? They'd want to know about my life on the Pucks wouldn't they? About the Resistance? This bedroom had nothing to do with either one of those.

The fact was, I had already given up pretty much everything I knew during the interrogations, since I really hadn't known that much about the Resistance in the first place, having just recently been made aware of it. It's what made me so perfect for a mission that was bound to end in my capture. I couldn't give up secrets I didn't know.

Eventually, I figured the best way to test whether it was some kind of simulation was to scrutinize everything in the room in excruciating detail in the assumption that no replication could possibly know so many intimate details about the room in which I'd spent the first twenty years of my life. So, I began to crawl around the room (because I was way too nauseous to stand) examining everything closely.

By the time I was closely studying the wooden _Coca-Cola_ box that served as a night-stand, I came to the sudden conclusion that there was no way that it could be an _Ensee_ trick to get me to reveal Resistance secrets. My reasoning was that the only way for them to pull off a simulation of this complexity would have been for them to tap directly into my memories, and if they could tap into my memories, then they could have just as easily taken whatever else they had wanted from my brain, including everything I knew about Oskar's band of merry men.

Indeed, if they _could_ read my mind, then what was the point of the numerous "question periods" over the last few weeks with Remmus Kemp himself?

By this point, I was finally able to stand, and was looking at the more adult-themed posters on the back of my door when I discovered that the mysterious temporal-displacement experience extended beyond the room itself. Vibrating faintly through the closed door was a deep, regular thumping sound. Like drums off in the distance, or...

... the deep bass from music coming from a cabinet radio in the living room downstairs.

The same radio that my father would turn on every morning when he got up at around six to prepare breakfast for himself and get ready for his day while waiting for the rest of the house to rouse. So absorbed had I been in experiencing my childhood bedroom, that it hadn't honestly occurred to me that there might be more to this fantasy beyond those four walls.

There might be people.

People I'd lost a very long time ago.

I swallowed hard and slowly opened my bedroom door. I was greeted by the smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting up the stairs and down the hallway, bringing with it the distant sounds of clinking dishes and cutlery. That's when it truly hit home what might lay waiting for me.

Mom? Dad?

As if to confirm my wondering thoughts, the deep sound of my father's gravelly voice called out.

"I won't ask again!" it said simply.

His voice went straight to my tear ducts, and I actually sobbed out loud despite myself as the tears began to flow unhindered. How appropriate that this was the first thing that I would hear him say in some thirty years. He had said that exact phrase multiple times every morning of my teens as he struggled to coax me and my brother out of bed in time to get ready for school. Every fifteen minutes or so, he'd tell us that he wouldn't ask us to get out of bed again even though we both knew that he would. Especially my brother, Patrick who, seemingly every morning, would wait until he couldn't wait any longer, leap out of bed, throw on his cleanest clothes and run out to catch a bus that would be just about to pull away, while grabbing a banana and his lunch from the kitchen counter along the way.

I lurched forward in the direction of my late father's voice, suddenly no longer caring whether or not this was real, just as long as I could see and talk to him again.

I didn't get far. Still not used to moving my new body, I miscalculated, and walked it right into the door jamb. It smarted a bit, but it didn't slow me down long. Readjusting my trajectory, I moved jerkily down the hallway towards the stairway, correcting for my lighter frame with every step so that, by the time I had reached the top of the stairs that led to the kitchen, I was pretty much used to things. I stopped there for a moment so that I could compose myself and wipe the tears from my eyes and cheeks with the bottom of my t-shirt. Then, taking a deep breath, and holding tightly to the bannister just in case, I descended the steps one at a time.

When I finally saw Dad, I didn't really mean to start crying again. I just couldn't help myself. It had, after all, been over thirty years for me since I'd last seen him, and he hadn't looked anywhere near this young at the time.

He froze, sitting at the breakfast table, his toast halfway to his open mouth and dripping with liquid honey as he stared at me.

Suddenly, my arms were around him, and I was cradling his very confused head against my chest. My father had never at all been affectionate, and the only time I finally got comfortable enough to truly let my guard down with the man and express my own affection towards him was in that hospital room in 2004 when I stroked his head and held his hand as he had struggled in vain to form words.

"Josh, what the hell," my father muttered into my shirt. "What the hell's the matter with you?"

If this actually were some kind of dream, then he felt so damned real. Hell, I could even smell him—that unique combination of Irish Spring soap and the stale sweat that always seemed to permeate his work clothes no matter how much Mom washed them. I was still crying, still trying to answer him through a voice that was overburdened with emotion, when my Mom entered the room. Then, the scene pretty much repeated itself, only with her this time. Mercifully, she didn't act nearly as surprised as had my father by my sudden and intense display of affection.

"Well, look at you," she sputtered as I squeezed her, my chin on her head. "You're just... well... full of hugs this morning aren't you." Then, after it was clear I wasn't about to let her go, she added, a little more warily, "Are you all right, Josh?"

Finally, I pulled away from her while explaining my odd behaviour with the first mollifying excuse I could muster, "Sure, sure. It's just... well, I got some good news this morning. I'm very excited about it." Turning away, I dried my eyes again as best I could and rallied to get my bottom lip from quivering and the tremor out of my voice. When I turned back, it was to find both of my parents staring at me again, even more confused than before. My father actually glanced briefly at the phone before asking, "From where?"

Oh right.

With no access to the internet in the 80s, the only news from the outside world was delivered via phone, television, mail, or newspaper—none of which applied to this situation since I'd only just come downstairs, and I didn't have any of those things in my bedroom.

"I mean... um, yesterday," I stuttered. "I got it _yesterday_. I just didn't get a chance to tell you about it then. What I mean to say is that I got good news yesterday, and it's put me in a very good mood this morning."

<Well, would you look at that. I just stopped to read what I'd been writing, and somewhere along the way, I've started writing it like a story. I didn't do it on purpose, it just seemed like the best way to express everything. So, let's keep it up shall we?>

Anyhow, I was feeling awkward standing in the middle of the room with them staring at me, and thankfully, chance saved the day—literally. In response to a scratching noise from the front door, my father said, "Let Chance in, wouldya?"

Holy fuck. Chance? I'd completely forgotten!

I bounded to the door and swung it open to let the yellow blur that was my childhood dog, Chance, into the house. I dropped to my knees and enveloped the excited Golden Retriever in a huge hug. As she licked me excitedly, we tumbled to the floor and I pretended to hide my face in my arms as she tried to force her nose between my arms to lick me some more. It didn't take much to get Chance excited, and I'm pretty sure that she could sense my own glee at being able to play with a dog that I hadn't actually seen in some forty-five years.

"Chance, old girl," I muttered through a mouthful of fur. "I've missed you."

We'd gotten the dog as a puppy just a few years before this, my father having surprised us out of the blue with her one day. He'd already decided that we should name the puppy Chance and none of us knew why he'd chosen that name until we were eating steak one night and my father, through a barely suppressed grin said, "Don't forget to give Chance a piece."

I swear lightbulbs appeared over each of heads at that point as my father cackled at his own humour. He'd been a huge _Beatles_ fan in his youth and he also loved wordplay like this. He'd told us that he'd apparently considered calling the dog Yoko, but figured that it would be too cruel a name, even for a dog. Dad would tell this same joke over and over again through the years, pretty much every time we talked about our dog, thinking that it never got old. We all begged to differ.

After a few minutes of rough-housing with Chance, I began to feel like somebody was watching me. Pulling the dog's licking snout away from me, I looked up to see both my parents staring, my Mom's eyes wide and coffee mug halfway to her mouth. I had to assume from their expressions that this wasn't the way I typically greeted our family dog every morning in my teens.

Had they heard me say that I missed a dog that I'd presumably just seen yesterday?

Deciding not to even broach the subject, I pushed Chance off of me, got to my knees and said, "Ok Chance, it's time I got some breakfast." Taking the cue, the dog skipped over to her dish and lapped noisily at some water while I thought about cereal. I mean, that _was_ what I ate for breakfast in the 80s right?

_Now, where in hell do we keep the cereal?_ I wondered as I brushed dirt and dog hair off my clothing.

I walked over to the cupboard that was my best guess, opened it, and was rewarded with a selection of various sugar-delivery systems disguised as breakfast substitutes. I wouldn't have let my kids eat this junk when they were young, but I figured that, since I was in Rome I should render onto Caesar—or something like that. I chose a box of Honeycombs, pulled it from the cupboard, and turned around to find that both of my parents were still staring at me expectantly.

"What?" my mother asked finally as she pulled a couple of heavy paper bags (that were presumably our lunches) out of the fridge and set them on the counter. "What was the news?"

Oh shit. They would call my bluff wouldn't they. At least they didn't ask about my comment to the dog.

As I thought about how to answer my parents, I carried the cereal box to the counter and opened a cupboard door to get a bowl and then closed it again immediately when I found only glasses and mugs within.

_What the hell year is it?_ I thought as I tried another door. _My bedroom is right out of the 80s, but when? My best guess was early to mid-decade—maybe. What was I into back then? What was going on at school? Shit Josh, think!_

I had guessed right with my second kitchen cupboard, and was pulling a bowl from the shelf (and trying not to get distracted by the fact that I'd forgotten that they had ever made bright orange Corelle dinnerware designs) as a solution occurred to me.

"I found out at school yesterday that a drawing I'd entered into the annual art department at show won a prize," I said,

My mother's response was effusive. "That's wonderful, Josh," she said while my father grunted grumpily, making it clear that he didn't think that this kind of good news warranted the tears and the clingy hugs that I'd just subjected both of them to moments earlier.

I ignored him, and, as I poured milk into my bowl of cereal, I asked them about their coming day in what turned out to be a successful ploy to change the subject. Hopefully, they wouldn't want to follow up on my white lie later and start asking where the prize was. As they spoke, I briefly wondered which chair was traditionally mine until I spotted Chance already sitting beside one waiting for me.

_Now,_ that's _a good dog. A dog who knew how much of a mess I made in my teens when eating, but still a good dog._

Sitting down at the table in the chair beside Chance, I looked over at my parents as I put a spoonful of Honeycombs in my mouth. I struggled to contain my emotion all over again as the flavours hit my system. It had been years since I'd tasted Honeycombs, and it was exactly as I remembered it.

Off in the distance, Mom and Dad were discussing their plans for the day and my mind was split between soaking in as many details as I could (just in case this whole time-displacement thing actually did suddenly end without warning), and trying to figure out exactly what year it was and—by extraction—how old I was in it.

The radio in the living room helped a bit. The news had just come on and, although I couldn't hear many of the details, I did catch the fact that it was a Thursday. They didn't mention the year of course, and I couldn't very well ask my parents for that detail. I might be able to get away with the date, but asking for the month would raise eyebrows, and asking what year it was would probably get me tested for drugs or alcohol.

I need a newspaper.

As casually as I could, I asked my Mom, who was just now pulling some toast out of the toaster. "Where's the latest paper, Mom?"

"It's where we always keep it, Josh," she answered as she pointed me towards the pile of magazines on the bench by the broom closet. "Did you want some toast while I'm here?"

"Well, of course I do," I answered jovially, jumping at the opportunity to taste Mom's home-made strawberry jam again. I stood up and walked over to the bench that Mom had indicated and started rifling through the stack balanced there. It was obviously spring or summer, otherwise all of this paper would, by now, have been burnt in the woodstove. On top were a few supermarket tabloids like the _National Enquirer_ and the _World News Weekly,_ my mother's main source of the original "fake news" before Trump redefined the term.

It didn't take long to find a copy of the _Northern Lights Focus_ —our town's weekly newspaper, but it took me a moment to be able to read any of the print beyond the headlines. In the first place, I wasn't wearing glasses, and in the second I no longer had presbyopia. For the first time in forever, I didn't have to hold the paper on the other side of the room to see the small print—I could actually hold it at a reasonable distance. Once I got used to the new visual perspective, I could clearly see that the date and on the front page was: "Wednesday, April 17, 1985."

Before I had a chance to truly react to this news though, my father was reminding me that it was time for me to get ready for school, and the roller-coaster ride that was a trip to my own past had begun in earnest...

back to top

# Chapter 4

## Reruns

Perhaps predictably, my first day back in high school after a fifty-year absence was a tad rocky, although I suppose it could have been a lot worse. The biggest problem was that I had enough of the same classes with the same people, that more than a few of them were looking at me and asking what kind of drugs I was on when I kept "forgetting" where I sat in whatever classroom I was in, or when I drew a blank in the review of topics that we had apparently been discussing only yesterday. More than once, I found myself reflexively reaching for the pocket where I'd have normally kept my smart phone so that I could look up the answer I needed on an internet that wouldn't even exist for another decade.

There was also my attitude that was apparently different too. For one, I was treating my classmates and friends like, well... children. For another, I was talking to our teachers (who were, to my perspective, just as much like kids as the actual teenagers) as if they were my equals. It was coming off as arrogant, and people were beginning to talk, not so covertly, behind my back. Not that I cared about what they said. Hell, maybe at one time I would have, but not under these circumstances.

Still, I knew that it wouldn't help to draw undue attention to myself so, at lunch, with Andi right beside me, lightly rubbing my upper thigh under the table in a very distracting way, I threw myself into conversations about current music trends, gossip about popular entertainers (even though I secretly knew what the future held for each and every one of them), and behind the scenes trivia for blockbuster movies. This last was something I was particularly well-versed in, thanks to the simple fact that the almost-elderly (like I had been just yesterday) didn't need as much sleep as did the young, and I had solved my decade-old problem of waking up at 3AM and being unable to get back to sleep by streaming movie after movie with the commentary tracks on.

A smaller problem was names. There were just so many kids, and so many of them had been people that I was supposed to have known. Tonight, I would have to locate my yearbook from 1984 and start memorizing.

Speaking of all those kids, it was when I was interacting with so many smiling, gleeful faces, that I began to notice something else, a feeling in the air that was a lot harder to define, much less describe. To put it succinctly, things were just a whole lot _lighter_.

I'm not saying, like Doc Brown, that there was a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull in the future, but I knew from personal experience that things were certainly about to get a lot more _anxious_ for everyone. Starting pretty much with the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, into the 2010s with the climate crisis scare, and right on up past the events of 2025, the people of the future were going to be constantly on edge, especially the kids. Yet here, in 1985, there was just a feeling of hope, in that the future held so much promise. It was definitely contagious, and actually a little intoxicating. I was definitely starting to feel like making a go at blending in had been worth it.

Until I saw Clay Peterson.

I spotted him for the first time at lunch, and was grateful that we hadn't known each other all that well in Grade 11, so that I wouldn't have to actually interact with him at all. In 1985, most of my friends were either geeks or the same ones I'd had in grade school, and Clay and I wouldn't become friends until next year sometime when we'd meet in Martial Arts classes. From there, luck would put us in the same residence at Western a few years later, and we would eventually become roommates in Toronto when I was doing my graduate studies in the mid-nineties.

It was around this time that Clay had... or rather would, steal my _Star Wars_ memorabilia and sell it for drug money. This would lead to a falling out that would end with me kicking him out of my apartment. With nowhere for him to go, he'd eventually end up sleeping on the kitchen floor of his buddy's run-down townhouse. It was the beginning of a downward spiral for him, one that would eventually land him in jail, first briefly for possession, and then for a longer term for armed robbery.

It was the kind of betrayal that had stuck with me for years, and still kind of hurt even now. But, there was a bigger emotion in play, one that I hadn't really become aware of until a many years after I'd thrown him out: guilt.

Clay's personality had always been both addictive and reactionary. I eventually came to realize that he hadn't stolen my stuff with malicious intent, but instead to feed his addiction. It had never been personal, even though I'd certainly taken it that way. At the time, I'd washed my hands of him, and blamed his decline on his own demons, but, eventually I began to think differently. Could I have done something to help him? If I hadn't evicted him, and instead got him help—the kind of thing that a true friend would have done—could things have turned out differently for him?

This was a topic that Oskar and I had discussed at great length in his bar on the Pucks. His older brother had been an alcoholic and had pickled his brain and squandered a bright future despite several interventions and the support from a large and loving family. Perhaps predictably, Oskar's opinion had been unforgiving.

"You did the right thing, Snowflake," he had said to me. "If you'd have kept him around. He just woulda stolen more. There ain't nothin' can help an addict 'till he's ready to help himself."

_Except, perhaps, time-travel_ , I mused as I finished off my peanut butter and honey sandwich. Mentally, I was putting Clay Peterson on the list of things that I wanted to do differently, assuming, of course, that this time-slip experience persisted.

In general today, I think that I managed to mask any obvious signs that I'd been temporally displaced, at least for the casual observer. Andi, however, was more than just a casual observer. Beyond our History class, she and I had a number of courses together, and I could see her looking at me funny every time I forgot a person's name, or when I needed direction as to which desk was mine. In English class, I was pretty sure I had it right, but then it turned out that I was remembering where I sat in a completely different class from a completely different grade even though it was the same room.

It didn't get any better when I tried to sneak off by myself for the remainder of the lunch break to go to one of the music practice rooms. I hadn't completely lied to Andi this morning when I told her why I couldn't go over to her house. It wasn't so much that I needed to practice my music, as I needed to _relearn_ my music. Naturally, she wanted to join me, which is when it became exceedingly obvious to Andi, with her playing the flute and me the clarinet, that I was doing a pretty lousy job reading music and had only a very vague recollection about how to finger my instrument.

Andi wasn't the only one who noticed either. Later that day, in music class, our teacher, Monsieur Rand, pulled me over afterwards, and in a heavily French-accented voice that was one part sympathetic and two parts sarcastic, asked if I wanted to take my instrument home to practice tonight.

It was Monsieur Rand's broken English that had inadvertently given me one of my most hated nick-names a few years earlier in Grade 9. It had been early in the semester, and he had asked us one at a time which instruments we most wanted to learn how to play. I told him that I wanted to play the trumpet, but he said I couldn't because the mouthpiece was small and you needed thin lips to play it properly.

"You cannot play the trumpet, Josh," he had said so that the entire class could hear. "You have too big lips."

Naturally, everyone else in class heard this differently and thought he was saying that I had two big lips, and thus my unfortunate "Big Lips" moniker was born. I can't recall why, but in the 80s, telling a male that he had big lips was an insult, so I had been shackled to one of the worst nicknames possible, all thanks to Monsieur Rand's tenuous grasp of English syntax.

That was neither here nor there at the moment though, so, in response to Rand's sardonic request that I get some practice tonight, I, of course, simply said, "Oui, Monsieur."

That had been the last class of the day and, as I said goodbye to Andi—who was about to start her walk home while I headed for my bus (which thankfully appeared to be right where I expected it to be, in a line with a bunch of others just beyond the student parking lot)—she asked, "Are you feeling all right today, Josh?"

I smiled as reassuringly as I could muster and shrugged my shoulders. "I've been working on a new computer program," I lied. "I've been staying up way too late, and it's been occupying all of my attention during the day. I'm sorry if I've seemed out of it today. My Mom always says that, sometimes, I'm just like an absent-minded professor."

_She had, in fact, always said this,_ I imagined Ron Howard narrating, as if this were an episode of _Arrested Development._

That seemed to placate the young woman, and she leaned up to kiss me full on the lips and I found myself welcoming the gesture. I'd forgotten how soft her lips were and how her hair smelled like cherries. When she was done, Andi nuzzled her head against my chest for a moment while I hugged her, then she pulled away so that she could catch up with her friends.

"Bye Josh," she called over her shoulder. "Call me tonight?"

"Um, sure," I called back as I walked towards my waiting bus. It was then that it occurred to me that I had no memory as to what her phone number was and, I was pretty sure that "speed dial" was still a few years off.

"What'd I tell you about your honey stick?" asked a familiar voice from behind me.

"Fat lot of good you were today," I replied without even looking back at Patrick. "I didn't see you at all."

"Basketball tourney," replied my brother simply, as he climbed onto the bus ahead of me. "But you wouldn't have noticed a tournament that big with your head up your own ass...orted science experiments."

Chuckling at Patrick's wordplay, I followed him up the steps. He wasn't wrong. I had had no idea that there had been a tournament going on today, but I guess that explained the buses from the other schools in our district parked over by the gymnasium.

On the bus, I went out of my way to be genial to Patrick, a gesture that he was thankfully reciprocating this time and, about a half-hour later, we were getting off the bus and getting tackled by a very excited Golden Retriever. We played with Chance together for a while, tossing her favourite chew toy back and forth and out for her to fetch, before eventually heading into the house chatting fairly comfortably. Mom was making supper and told us that we had about an hour before it was ready, which was more helpful than she knew since I had no recollection as to what our normal after-school schedule was. While my brother turned on the TV to watch reruns of _I Dream of Jeannie_ , I headed towards my bedroom, Chance in tow.

As I walked upstairs (after hugging my Mom tightly and asking about her day), I found myself singing "Time Warp," one of the songs from _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_.

"With a bit of a mind flip, you're into the time slip, and nothing can ever be the same..."

_Yeah, that sounds about right,_ I mused.

Back in my bedroom, I powered up my Commodore 64, as well as the disk drive that sat beside it. Then, I made sure that TV set that I used as a monitor was set to channel 3, and flipped it on as well. After a moment, the familiar blue boot screen faded into view with large blocky text across the top of the screen identifying the system. Below this, in the same blocky text was the word "READY", beneath which was a flashing rectangular box that indicated the location of the text prompt.

READY.  
█

I stared at the flickering prompt for a few minutes, confused.

Ready? Ready for what?

I'd completely forgotten what to do. A computer system that didn't offer me choices by way of icons was completely foreign to me now. With this ancient computer, I actually had to know what I wanted to do ahead of time, and then know what command to type in, as well as how to properly compose that command.

It was so strange to be looking at this familiar machine yet feeling so lonely. Partly because it wasn't connected inherently to a World Wide Web of any kind like we'd all start to take for granted in the future, and partly because even that kind of World Wide Web would itself eventually disappear. I was being nostalgic for both my future and my past at the same time and had to smile at the oddness of it all.

On a whim, I entered the question:

WHERE THE HELL AM I?

I was half thinking that, were I living some kind of 80s time-travel adventure movie, the computer would actually be in on it, and reply with something kind of smarmy like "Don't you mean _when_ the hell are you?" but instead the immediate response was one that was all too familiar with me now that I was looking at it:

?SYNTAX ERROR  
READY.  
█

Yeah. That sounds about right.

Pulling open one of the desk drawers, I found my cache of floppy disks, hoping to locate a game that I could play to pass the time. These were the original floppy disk—a five-inch square of protective material with an oval window on its side that exposed a portion of the magnetic circle that stored some 700 odd Kilobits of data. It was a shape that would be familiar to generations of people for years to come, even those who had never seen a real floppy disk, when it becomes the universally-recognized SAVE icon.

I flipped through the floppies looking for something light to play, so I passed on the opportunity to run the text-based _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ because I really didn't feel like dying over and over again today. I used to play that game so much as a kid, and knew how involved it could be; it wasn't the kind of game you could just slip into for a few minutes as a distraction.

Eventually, I found a disk labelled "GAMES", and slid it into the drive. Nothing happened. As I stared at it, I seemed to recall that you had to type a command to load the disk directory or something, and that directory would tell you what programs were actually on the floppy. Then you had to type a command to tell the machine to load that program and then, once it was in the machine's memory, you would tell the computer to run it.

Damned if I could recall the proper syntax of the directory command though, and this system seemed to be all about syntax. I pulled the well-worn manual off the shelf above my desk, flipped through it until I found what I needed, and then just followed the instructions. Within ten minutes (most of which was spent waiting for the program to load, during which I was cursing and asking "How long can it take to load a program that is obviously less than 64K into memory?") I was playing _Choplifter_ , one of my favourite games from the time. The game was fairly straight-forward in that I used my joystick to pilot a tiny helicopter from right to left across a series of screens to rescue hostages, even as I fought off the enemy in their tanks and jet planes. The nostalgia made manifest by the sights and sounds of playing this old game helped me with my feelings of loneliness.

After a few levels though, I began to get restless and a little bored. Although I wanted to engage my mind, I still wanted to explore the physical environment I found myself returned to and soak up every detail. So, I quit the game and turned off the computer. Then, I sat there in my rickety old office chair—a hand-me-down from my father—and spun in place slowly as I took in my room again. Nothing appeared to have changed, meaning that, at least so far, this time displacement thing was being consistent.

Deciding to explore my desk a little more, I pulled open a few drawers and looked through them. The long one that was right above the desk's leg opening, not unexpectedly, held pens and pencils and the like, as well as a couple of film canisters with undeveloped cartridges in them, so I closed it and shifted my attention to the three drawers to the right. This particular exploration however proved to be a little more difficult, because Chance was assuming that, since I was bent over in my chair towards the ground, I wanted to play. I scratched her behind the ears until she settled down out of the way.

The top drawer was a bit of a catch-all, containing a couple of old cameras, an envelope full of participation ribbons from track meets (unlike Patrick, I never got anything from a sports contest beyond a token to prove that I'd actually been there), novelty souvenirs from Robertson's winter carnival, a number of science fair medals (all gold, naturally), a bag with an old watch that I'd taken apart but couldn't figure out how to reassemble, a few electronic circuit boards, and an old transistor radio. In addition, rattling around on the bottom of the drawer, were some random pieces of Lego, some assorted screws, a dozen or so silver dollars that my Great-Grandfather had given me (one every year since the early 70s), a couple of puzzle games, as well as some old rocks that I'd kept because I'd thought that they had been culturally modified.

_They had not been culturally modified_ , said Ron Howard's voice, once again.

The second drawer held paper and envelopes and other stationery products, while the one directly below it was locked.

Oh right! My secret stash!

I couldn't for the life of me remember what was actually in my secret stash, I just remembered that it was secret enough that it needed to be kept locked. Sucking at my teeth in thought as I resumed spinning in my chair, I tried to remember where I kept the drawer key hidden. It wasn't on the ring in my pants pocket, so I tried my other secret stash: the little cardboard box that I'd placed inside the heat vent in my early teens before I got this desk. I was just about to stick my hand down the pipe in the floor when I remembered that, by 1985, I wasn't using this hiding place anymore, not since my father had cleaned out the heat vents and miraculously found, among other things, the pen that he'd lost just a few months earlier—the one where the woman's bathing suit slid off when you tipped it upside down, revealing her naked body beneath.

The next place I checked for the key was the bookshelf in my closet. When I'd been about a dozen years old, I'd been home sick one day and had asked my mother to buy me a new book to read. I told her that I preferred a _Hardy Boys_ mystery, but she couldn't find one, so she returned with something else entirely: a book about some kind of mutiny on a Victorian sailing ship. The story was grittier than I was used to and I gave up after a few chapters, hating it so much. It was at that point that I decided that I would turn the book into the perfect hiding place, in much the same way that Andy Dufresne modified his Bible to hide his rock hammer in _The_ _Shawshank Redemption_. I cut a large rectangular hole through each of the pages, leaving just enough paper around the edges so that it would still look like a book to a casual observer, then I glued the pages together, and just like that, I had a space big enough to hide small things—like a key.

Sure enough, I was right. The key to my desk drawer (attached to a key chain charm that looked kinda like E.T.) was hidden in the book along with a few old coins from the 1950s and a note from a girl I'd known in grade school telling me that she had a crush on me.

Using the key to finally open the bottom drawer that held my secret stash, I was immediately surprised to find that there weren't nearly as many things in it as I thought there would be, or at least not as many things as I'd thought needed to be kept secret.

Oh sure, there were some very descriptive (and in places X-rated) love notes that I'd exchanged with Andi over the last year, but I couldn't understand why I thought to lock up the old cloth that my Mom had used to bathe me as an infant. Beyond that, there was a sketch book with a number of nude sketches that I'd done (all very artistic and tasteful of course) as well as a pad of yellow lined paper with my handwriting on it, locked up because I'd once made the mistake of leaving my intimate thoughts lying around for my brother to find. The document currently visible on the top page of the pad appeared to be a letter that I had been writing to Andi apologizing for something I'd done recently. I couldn't recall what it had been, and I couldn't force myself to read past the following line:

"The only thing I can offer by way of motivation for my behaviour is that, in my short life, I've learned how to fly, but have yet to perfect my landings."

OMG. Seriously?

My entire teen years should have been preceded by a warning: Mind the Melodrama!

I put down the pad like it was on fire, and picked up the most lurid thing in the whole drawer: a box of condoms. From the condition of the box, it looked like I'd had it for a long time, which wasn't surprising since, in a tiny town like Robertson, you couldn't just go to the local pharmacy to buy condoms all that easily because the cashier knew you and would tell your parents. Instead, you had to make arrangements to go to nearby Timmins (or better yet, have a friend go instead) where you were pretty much anonymous. This kind of subterfuge may sound a little funny from the perspective of a few decades down the line when condoms were distributed for free in many schools, but in 1985, you still couldn't even show condoms on TV without having to blur them out.

I put most of the things back the way I had found them in the drawer and locked it up again, but kept the key, winding it onto the set in my pants pocket (minus the E.T. figure). This drawer would be the perfect place to store the journal that I was definitely going to buy so that I could record my memories of the future, and I wanted easy access to it from now on.

I had just gone back to staring at the room, and was just standing up to get a closer look at the model of the Enterprise to see if the running lights in the saucer still worked, when I heard my Mom's voice calling us all to supper which, I found out a moment or two later, was spaghetti.

This wasn't just any old regular spaghetti, mind you, it was my Mom's spaghetti—from the 80s. Oh, I've tried to replicate the recipe over the years, but nothing has come anywhere near as good, which is why I actually moaned out loud a little with the first mouthful. If either my parents or my brother noticed, they didn't say anything, and everybody just kept eating while chatting about their day.

_What is it that makes this spaghetti so good?_ I wondered. _Is it the tiny canned mushrooms? Her blend of spices? The fact that she uses regular ground beef instead of lean? Or is it just my taste buds?_

I'd remembered reading somewhere that taste buds faded as you aged. Maybe that was it, but I wasn't sure if it was the buds that I was currently using were newer than the ones I'd left behind in 2035, or if it had just been so long since I'd tasted my Mom's cooking, but, between this meal and the strawberry jam this morning, I was in heaven.

This actually got me thinking about something else. If my consciousness shifted into my younger body, was it my consciousness that was doing the tasting or was it the taste buds themselves? I didn't get far pondering this because my interest was piqued by my father talking about how his new motion sensitive light wasn't working the way it was supposed to.

Still distracted by the deliciousness that was my Mother's spaghetti, I wasn't really thinking when I said, "It's probably just electromagnetic interference. This generation of motion sensors used passive infrared systems that were notoriously inaccurate, especially if the motion in question was either lateral or slow, but it was the interference that was the biggest problem. I should be able to shield it properly with some filters and feed-through capacitors." I spun more spaghetti onto my fork without noticing that I was now the only one actually eating. "I'll take a look at it tomorrow, but I'll have to make a trip in to Radio Shack to get the parts."

I put the food in my mouth and stared back at three blank faces, forks either midway to mouth or food in midchew.

_Oh right._ _My seventeen-year-old self didn't know anything about electrical engineering._

At first, there was a lengthy period of silence, where the only thing anybody could hear was the sound of air whistling through my father's preternaturally large nostrils, before everyone slowly resumed eating. They were all still glaring at me though, my mother wearing a shocked expression and my father looking apprehensive.

"This spaghetti is delicious, Mom!" I started effusively, trying to deflect attention away from what I'd just said. "I've always wondered: what spices do you use?"

Almost coldly, my mother answered, "None."

"Ah, I see." Well that hadn't worked, but had finally explained why my own sauce had never tasted like hers. I rallied and tried something new. "Did Patrick mention that he single-handedly won the basketball tournament with a six-pointer?" I was offering my brother two opportunities here to speak up. One to talk about his game performance, and the other to correct me. Thankfully, he rose to the occasion.

"Well, that's not exactly right," he said in his slow drawl before launching into an animated play-by-play of the game's final moments. Within mere minutes, my mother was "oohing" and "aahing" over Patrick's narration even as my father continued to glower at me. I went back to enjoying the spaghetti, only speaking up a few times for the remainder of the meal to prompt Patrick to keep talking.

The moment dessert was done, I helped clean up the dishes before zipping upstairs, saying that I had a ton of homework to catch up on. It wasn't a lie. If I was going to succeed at this masquerade, I was going to have to relearn a ton of stuff that most adults took for granted. Some classes, like Math and Science for instance, likely weren't going to be a problem with my level of education, but History? Who could remember all those dates and events fifty years gone? I needed to do some research, and it was going to be a lot harder to do without access to the internet.

Shortly after 8 o'clock, I called Andi. It was actually surprisingly easy to figure out her number, thanks to a wonderfully archaic invention called the _telephone book!_ In 1985, when extra phone lines were expensive and cell phones hadn't taken over, there was usually only one phone per household, and its number was almost always listed in the community phone book. I was lucky that, in a small town like Robertson, Petras was a unique enough last name so that there was only one listing for it in the directory, because I didn't remember her father's given name until I saw it on the page.

Dialing the old rotary phone hanging from the wall on the kitchen was another experience entirely as I waited for each turn of the dial to click its way back to the beginning. When had I last used one of these? I mean there had to have been a last time right? Had I known it at the time?

Andi and I spoke for close to a half hour. Mercifully, she had completely abandoned her earlier concern about my well-being, and went on breezily about what had happened to her in Toronto over the last few days while I drifted along happily listening, having forgotten just how much I enjoyed the melodic, almost sing-song, sound of her voice.

My father walked by twice while I was on the phone, the second time making a judgmental snort that made his displeasure clear that I'd been on it for too long. He used the phone for business and got most of his inquiries in the evening when people weren't at work, so he didn't like having it tied up. Before I could interrupt Andi to tell her that I should go, it was as though she was somehow expecting that very thing.

"Well, I'm guessing your father has about had enough of you tying up his phone," she said by way of winding down the conversation. "And I've got some work to catch up on from missing three days of school, so I'm gonna run. See you tomorrow, Josh. I love you..."

I hesitated, but only for a moment. How had I usually responded to a declaration of love from Andi? "Um, I love you too, Andi," I said finally, assuming that she wouldn't have offered it if she wasn't at least fairly sure it would be reciprocated. This wasn't our first such avowal was it?

There was a crackling silence on the line for a moment before Andi's bright voice simply said "G'nite, Josh," before the line went dead.

Putting the phone back on the hook, I stared at it for a while and was surprised when it rang.

"Hello," I said into the receiver after I'd picked it up, wondering if it was Andi calling back but, as it turned out, it was a client of my Dad's. After instinctively searching in vain for a mute button on the phone, I covered the mouth piece with my hand and called out for my father.

"He's in the workshop," I heard my mother's voice yell from downstairs, so, hanging up the receiver on the little notched shelf that my father had built for just such a need, I sought him out in the garage that was attached to the house.

"I'll take it out here," he answered, so I went back to the kitchen and hung up the phone properly when I was sure that he'd picked up the extension in his workshop. Then, I meandered downstairs to find Patrick (on the couch with Chance cuddled on top of him) and my mother in the rec room, partway through the Thursday night "Must See TV" lineup of _Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers,_ and _Night Court_. I'd normally be watching with my family, but I'd seen them all. Several times. Reruns and repeats were all we had on Prince Edward Island in 2035, as there wasn't much in the way of new content with Hollywood and the major TV networks all gone.

I watched for a while as Michael J. Fox, as Alex Keaton in _Family Ties_ , sat up on the counter and sipped orange juice as he delivered his zingers and one-liners. My mother and brother laughed at all the right places, but I was having a hard time paying attention to the actual plot, because I was instead musing about the fact that Michael J. Fox was Canadian, which somehow segued into thoughts about Canadian culture in North American popular media in the 80s.

About a decade earlier than this, there had been an effort by the Canadian government to combat the cultural onslaught from the south by instituting rules on Canadian content. No longer could TV programs pretend to be American in order to appeal to the US audience, they had to be, at least in part, noticeably Canadian. This was no problem with old shows like _King of Kensington_ (even though its frail sets, that seemed to shake every time a door was closed, made it exceedingly obvious with even a cursory viewing that this wasn't an American production), but other shows had to try a little harder, leading to some unintentionally hilarious results. SCTV, for example, reacted sarcastically to the request from the CBC, their broadcast network, to increase Canadian content by a couple of minutes each week, by introducing two characters that were stereotypically Canadian. The writers introduced these hosers who would wear toques and do quintessential Canadian things like drink beer and eat back bacon during the segment that was, perhaps predictably, only as long as CBC had decreed. Against all odds, the _Great White North_ would become a hit, and Bob and Doug McKenzie would become celebrities here and abroad, demonstrating that being unapologetically Canadian was actually kind of appealing.

The episode of _Cheers_ that followed _Family Ties_ was one that I'd seen a number of times, being the one where Diane goes off to Europe to marry Frasier, and Sam hires an older, unattractive waitress to replace her. I was halfway tempted to start quoting lines of dialogue before they were spoken just to freak out my mother and brother, or just tell them how the whole Sam/Diane relationship would eventually end with Shelley Long leaving the show to be replaced by Kirstie Alley, but I resisted. It would definitely take some explaining, especially after what had just happened at supper.

I really wanted to go upstairs and practice my clarinet, but I was concerned that suddenly walking away from shows I typically enjoyed watching would be seen as being out of character for me. It had only been one day for me in April of 1985, and already things were getting complicated.

I began to crave something at that point - something that I knew would be off limits to my seventeen-year-old body: alcohol.

The strong stuff.

back to top

# Chapter 5

## Meltdown

In the rare moments that I was able to hold onto sleep last night, I dreamt of a future that was now my past. The rest of the time, I would lie there wondering if I had shifted in time again, but then I would see the stars through my bedroom window, and feel better.

Then, around 3:30AM, I woke up so completely that I gave up even trying to stay in bed any longer, mostly because I was tired of the internal analytical monologue that had been running pretty much all night long in the background. Indeed, from the moment that my head had hit the pillow last night (around 11:30, after I'd spent over an hour silently relearning how to play music and finger a clarinet), my brain had seemed to figure out that this was the first real chance to actually think about what was happening to me. I certainly couldn't have been expected to focus on it during the day, what with everything that took place—from seeing my dead parents alive, to kissing my high school sweetheart again. What's more, around 9:30—like a loud irritating noise that you only notice once it stops—I finally started to realize that I had actually been in shock the whole day.

So, what had last night's running session of reasoning and rational contemplation resulted in? Well, no matter how I spun it, I kept coming back to the exact same conclusion that I'd already reached yesterday morning: I had to play along and pretend to fit into my own past. And, this last bit was the most important part, I had to do it _surreptitiously_. No more slip-ups like the one at supper.

Pulling myself out of bed, I stood up and stretched a little, once more marvelling at a body without any aches and pains, or muscles that got pulled simply from the act of coughing, or a back that got thrown out by an over-enthusiastic sneeze. I turned the light on and looked around the room casually, giving it a cursory examination. Nothing appeared to have changed, so I probably hadn't shifted to a different time period in my sleep again. My school bag was still on top of my desk, and my clarinet case was sitting on top of it: just the way I had left both before I'd gone to bed. Still, I couldn't be absolutely sure that I hadn't traveled even a day or something without knowing the precise date, but I couldn't check this as I normally would have on my smartphone, nor could I simply turn on the radio, because it would still be playing generic overnight programming—with no record of the date and time.

Man, the 80s suck, at least insofar as continuous access to information goes.

Finally, it occurred to me to check my school books, where I found the class notes that I'd made the day before, just as I remembered them. I hadn't moved temporally; this was still my new reality, and I wasn't stuck in a _Groundhog Day_ situation where I kept living the same day repetitively.

I had a few hours to kill until I could safely move around the house without the risk of waking anybody up (most especially Chance, who slept downstairs in the recroom), so I pulled a few binders off the shelves above my desk to see what was in them. Most of them contained notes from last year's classes, but what I found in the papers for my Grade 10 course, _Man in Society_ was a huge surprise. It was one that, I was confident, would be very useful in figuring out how my peers in this time period would be expecting from me in terms of my temperament and behaviour.

I had pretty much forgotten that, at the very beginning of the course in September of 1984, our teacher had told us that she'd be giving a full ten minutes at the beginning of every class to make a journal entry. She had instructed us to use this entry to record how we were feeling about the things that were happening in our lives so that we could hopefully look back at it later and see how much we had grown during the tenth grade, a time that she said was one of the most formative of our lives. My goodness, was she ever right, because what I read in that binder was eye-opening to say the least! I'd completely forgotten about this insecure child that I used to be and how aloof I had been to those around me, especially Patrick.

It really is amazing how a single year can change a person. The boy who started journaling in September was feeling superior to all the close-minded people in his school, resentful that he had basically been ostracized because of his intellect, and claiming that he hated everyone about as much as they hated him. In the entries, this almost-stranger was clearly overcompensating for his sense of loneliness by saying repeatedly that it didn't bother him at all, at least not as long as his teachers were happy with him, because, in school, that was all that really mattered.

Over the next two hours, I read as my younger-self yearned for a girlfriend who understood him, friends who shared his passions, and teachers who praised him. I read about all the changes he went through as he joined clubs, found new interests, met new friends, learned to talk to girls, and grew as a person. And, perhaps most amazingly, I watched as my younger self went from blaming his temper on others, to learning that his mood didn't have to hinge on external circumstances, or something that this version of myself had called "fate". Amazingly, long before the self-help movement popularized such messages of self-empowerment in social media memes, I had discovered them for myself.

Slowly, almost reverentially, I closed the binder and sat back in my office chair. For the longest time, I just sat there, spinning slowly and staring at the walls of my bedroom as they slipped gradually by, contemplating what this journal had to say about the man I had eventually grown into, before that same man had become a boy again.

Around 5:30 AM, I decided to head downstairs so that I could surprise my father by having his coffee ready for him when he got up. When he came down a short while afterwards and saw me standing in the kitchen (surreptitiously putting away the coffee mug that I myself had just used), he stopped short and glared at me warily before eventually eyeing the steaming mug that I'd just set out for him with the jar of liquid honey sitting beside it.

"Hmph," he snorted, moving past me as I stood there beside the fridge, grinning.

"I hope it's the way you like it, Dad," I said through a mischievous smile, knowing that it was _exactly_ the way he liked it, having learned a long time ago how to brew it to his precise specifications.

Wait. Did I used to call him 'Dad' in my teens? Or was it 'Daddy,' or 'Father,' or even 'Pa'?

Crap, it wasn't 'Sir' was it?

My father took a sip from the mug. "It's fine," he grumbled. From him, that was high praise indeed, and I beamed.

Yeah, my Dad had always been a tough nut. Raised on a depression-era farm in the Ottawa area of Ontario, he inherited his tough-as-nails attitude from my grandfather, who I'm told once killed a deer with a pitchfork because he didn't have time to go home and get his gun.

This was the family legacy I inherited, even though I often wondered if it was wasted on me, as I have been known to cry during Disney cartoons, and the only time I've ever handled a pitchfork was when I hung an old one up on my wall because I thought it looked pretty.

Turning from the table, I opened the cupboard door where the coffee and tea supplies were kept. I'd barely had time for more than a few sips of coffee before I'd heard Dad on the stairs, and I knew that I couldn't suddenly start drinking it in front of him, but thought that I might at least be able to get away with a tea. I started sorting through what I thought would be a selection of teas, only to find that the only variety available was the vanilla of teas: orange pekoe. My family wasn't much for anything that might be at all exotic, like herbal teas—or spices either, for that matter.

"What are you looking for, dear," asked my mother who had come up behind me while I'd been looking in the cupboard.

Without thinking, I asked her, "Do we have any green tea?"

There was silence for a moment before my father asked, "What the hell's a _green_ tea?"

Later, sitting on the bus beside Patrick (with _Every Breath You Take_ by The Police playing on the bulky vehicle's staticky radio), I discovered that he seemed to think that, with my being polite to him yesterday and then peppering him with questions about his tournament at supper, that I was finally coming around to liking sports. So, naturally, he had taken it upon himself to give me a crash course in... well, pretty much everything to do with the subject. As I listened to him intently, asking the occasional question (especially about the concept of being "offside", since I'd never really truly been able to understand it), I really wished that I could have remembered which team would win the Stanley Cup this year, because it would have been nice to blow his mind with advanced knowledge like that.

The funny things was, I had once known this guy when I was living in Toronto who used to memorize things like that. He could tell you who had won each of the major Academy award categories, or what team won whatever major tournament for the last two decades. To others—whenever he'd perform it as a party trick—he'd explain that he had committed this information to memory just in case he was ever thrown back in time and needed to make a lot of money, but he had privately revealed to me that he was just exercising his memory muscle. For whatever reason, I sure could have used some of those facts now that I, myself, had been unexpectedly thrown back in time.

The only piece of analogous sports trivia that I had at my disposal was that the Toronto Blue Jays would win back to back World Series in 1992 and 1993. Which didn't really mean much to me now, since I couldn't recall if the Jays had even been around in 1985. Like I said, I didn't much follow sports. Still, this meant that, if I could wait seven years, I stood to make a fortune betting on the Jays to win it all.

Managing the school hallways this morning was a little easier than it had been the day before thanks to the time that I had taken last night to study the yearbook, meaning that I could put more names on faces today and greet people a little more properly. I was a little more relaxed this time around too, which is probably why I was noticing the smells in the building more. At the core was the high school's distinctive aroma, a unique combination of a hospital and the gym change room. But layered on top of it, in new and unique combinations depending on where I walked, were the various student-supplied scents. Perfumes and colognes permeated the air so thickly in places that they made my eyes water and I could feel them sticking to the back of my throat like an aerosol spray. I had to suppress the urge to cough as I worked my way through the crowds to get to Andi's locker, only to find that she wasn't there.

We had agreed to meet here hadn't we? Have I got the right floor?

Scanning the crowd and not seeing her, I eventually gave up waiting, went to my own locker to drop off my jacket and school bag, and then wandered off in the direction of geek window. Amazingly, that's actually where I found Andi, deep in conversation with Calvin, and clearly not having even been to her locker yet since she was still wearing her jacket and carrying her school bag.

"...let me get this straight," Calvin was saying incredulously, glancing up at me as he spoke. "You want to come to our next Video Recital?"

"Yep."

"But you're a girl!" he protested.

"I am aware of that fact," Andi replied through a cheeky smile.

"Group bylaws require that we confirm it nonetheless," I interjected.

If I was expecting my comment to discomfit Andi, it failed, because she immediately shot back, "I'm sure that Mr. Donegal, a group member in good standing, can attest to the fact that I'm a female. He is, by now, an expert witness in this regard."

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about Andi's playful side. I'd missed this. She always gave as good as she got—sometimes even better.

Calvin's face was colouring a little and, while Andi pulled my face to hers for a quick kiss, he said, "All right you two, break it up. What do you think Josh? Andi wants to come to the next video recital."

"She mentioned something about that yesterday, come to think of it," I said, before turning to Andi. "I thought you said you were busy."

"My plans changed," she answered. "The Babcocks don't need a babysitter after all. And I think your little party sounds like fun."

"Well then, I have no objection," I said. "I too think it'll be fun."

"Done," concluded Calvin. "Welcome to the group Andi. Next weekend, we're meeting at Josh's place, and we'll be watching _Blade Runner,_ _Temple of Doom_ , and _Superman: the Movie_ , so you've got a week to practice."

"I want to choose one of the movies," Andi said, her grin once again looking cheeky.

By this time, a few of our other friends had begun to gather around us, and had figured out what was happening. Collectively, they gasped at what Andi had just requested.

Calvin wasn't exactly angry, but he was certainly affronted. "You want to choose a movie? That's never been done before! The movies are always chosen by the last person to host."

"That'd be you?" Andi asked innocently, batting her eyelashes impishly.

"Yes."

"Ok Calvin, let me put it this way," said Andi sweetly. "I'll be the first girl to come to one of your typically male-only parties, right? But, if you let me choose a movie this time, then I'll make sure that I'm not the only girl at _future_ parties."

The group of geeks that now surrounded us started murmuring excitedly. "Girls?" I heard one squeaky voice stammer breathlessly. "There could be _girls_ at our party?"

Calvin was smiling now, knowing that he'd been outsmarted, but he was obviously loving every minute of it. There was no way he could very well say "no" now, not when so many in the group were obviously so thrilled about seeing an honest-to-goodness girl at a traditionally male geek get-together. Not when there was a possibility that there could be even more of these seemingly alien creatures at future parties.

"Fine," Calvin said finally. "You can choose one of my movies. _One!_ And no garbage by John Hughes, no Disney, or anything with Tom Hanks. Let me know by end of day so that I can let the others know so that they can prepare."

Andi was bouncing up and down on her feet now. "Oh, no worries, Calvin," she said. "I know just the movie. You're gonna love it."

The others were staring at Andi now like she was some kind of celebrity, and they weren't far off. Seeming to understand the old show business adage to leave them wanting more, the young Greek woman said, "Ok, gotta run and get ready for home room." Then she spun around, gave me a knowing wink, and practically skipped away down the hallway, deftly avoiding the crowds of kids milling all around us.

Calvin was still smiling when he called after her, "And no Muppets either!" Then, turning to me, he said, "I'll blame you if I have to give up my crown to a girl, Donegal."

Shrugging my shoulders as if to say that things were out of my hands, I turned and headed off towards my own home room. Behind me, I could hear the others in our group chattering happily about the prospect of actually being at the same party as a girl.

"What do girls eat?" I actually heard one of them ask.

I was just about to walk into my homeroom classroom when Andi caught me by the arm to stop me. Slightly out of breath, she pulled my head down so that she could whisper in my ear.

"Please let me know when you'd like to conduct that examination, Mr. Donegal. Y'know, the one to confirm that I am, in fact, a female. My schedule is pretty tight, but I'm sure I can fit you in." Then she kissed me lightly on the lips, and was off down the hall without another word.

I stared after her in wonder as she walked away, trying not to ogle, and shifting my legs uncomfortably at the sudden pressure I was feeling south of the border. Another side effect of the shock of my time displacement wearing off was that I was suddenly aware of a healthy amount of age-appropriate teenage hormones, and Andi was sparking every single one of them. The little voices in my head were still telling me that I was actually an old man and that it was wrong to lust after Andi like this, but those voices were getting weaker and weaker by the minute. This, by itself probably wouldn't be all that bad if it weren't for the fact that they were the combined voices of Heather and Celeste, and they were making me feel guilty that I wasn't missing them and our children more than I was.

It took me a few minutes to come back to myself, and, when I did, everyone in my homeroom was staring at me expectantly, including Monsieur Grenier. Sheepishly, I held my binder to cover my crotch, crossed the threshold into the classroom, and took my seat just as the announcements began. I didn't really hear what was being said over the PA system though, as I was too busy contemplating the fact that I was entering an impossible love quadrangle with three women, one who was ostensibly fifty years my junior, one who hadn't been born, and another that I'd yet to even meet. This had all become exceedingly complicated. If there actually was a person responsible for my spontaneous trip through time, he or she was going to get an earful if we ever met!

My first class of the day was Math with poor Monsieur Lagacy, who had a grasp of the English language that was even more tenuous than was Monsieur Rand's. This meant that, every time he mispronounced the word "polynomial" or "hypotenuse," (by putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable) his class of already restless teenagers would break out into gales of laughter, which would just serve to enrage the man to the point that his already high-pitched voice got shriller and squeakier.

Personally, I liked the man, and I had learned a lot from him and his class, and not just about math. For instance, it was here that I first started to break through my once debilitating shyness and discovered that, if I could be entertaining, others could look past my freakishness enough to stop laughing _at_ me and start laughing _with_ me. This epiphany had come to me when I had been asked to stand in front at the black board in front of the whole class and explain a concept, but I had been so nervous that I had spoken so quickly that nobody could understand anything that I had said. When Monsieur Lagacy told me to do it again, but slower, I had obeyed, but not in the way he had been expecting. I began to talk like a tape machine with slow batteries, just as I had once seen Robin Williams do on an episode of _Mork and Mindy_. To my great surprise, the class erupted in laughter. I can remember standing there at the front of the room, soaking it all in, thinking that this was much better than getting teased.

This had been the day that I had discovered that, if I kept my bullies and tormenters laughing, they wouldn't harass me. It worked surprisingly well, and with time, I learned to balance being a smart-ass with being genuinely funny. With more practice, I even learned to be flippant without being sarcastic so that nobody got hurt feelings, and it eventually became my goto state for dealing with uncomfortable situations.

Today though, for the first time since I was pretty much forced to go back to school in 1985, I found myself actually enjoying a classroom lesson. Even though I'd taken advanced math courses in University that had greatly expanded on the concepts that Monsieur Lagacy was now teaching, it was a thrill to relearn the basic building blocks all over again. I also had to admit that Lagacy was doing an excellent job, despite the children making his task all the more difficult, and I told him as much as I was leaving class. Although, by the expression on his face in response, I'm pretty sure that he thought I was being sarcastic.

In my next class, Andi sat behind me, and I had a hard time concentrating on the subject because she kept tracing huge hearts on my back with the end of her pencil whenever Mrs. Cooper wasn't looking. It was much the same thing in Geography afterwards, only this time we were far enough away from the front of the class that she could pass me notes that described, in fairly graphic detail, what she wanted to do to me this coming weekend. The frankness of the content was blunted somewhat by the fact that she'd topped many of her lowercase 'i's' with little hearts, but it still had the desired effect on me. I spent most of the class in a heated sweat, replying to Andi as briefly as I could get away with, hoping against hope that Mr. Drummond didn't ask me to stand up to answer any questions.

Lunch was actually a bit of a reprieve from Andi's targeted onslaught of affection. Although we were sitting beside each other, and she was sitting close enough so that our thighs were touching, she was sufficiently distracted by our friends. I spent most of time just listening and soaking it all in, amazed at the young woman's ability to engage so many people at once. Her curiosity and desire to ask questions turned what would have normally been banter about gossip among teenagers into a deeper conversation about wider topics. She wasn't talking about people, she wanted to talk about _things_. It was no wonder that she would eventually get into broadcasting, and be so successful at it too.

Fuck. She's not making it easy to keep her at arm's length.

It wasn't something that I wanted to admit—with me noticing things about Andi seemingly for the first time—but I was becoming enamoured with her all over again. This, in and of itself, wouldn't have been that big a deal, were it not for those two imaginary voices in my head who were still mocking me and telling me to act my age. I knew that those voices were nothing more than a projection of my conscience and that I (probably) wasn't going insane. It was just that, the negative thoughts were coming a little more often now, and they'd also expanded into new, shame-inducing, territory. Now, pretty much every time I found myself actually enjoying myself as I relived my own past, I started to feel genuinely guilty. Guilty that I had escaped from a terrible future, and that everyone else that I had known there—at least as far as I could tell— had not. Was there an alternate timeline where they still existed? If so, then why had I been allowed to escape into the past and relive my youth while they were stuck in the dystopia that I'd left behind? What had I done to deserve such a sweet reward?

The kind of survivor guilt that I was feeling right now definitely wasn't covered in your run-of-the-mill psychology text books.

This whole train of thought was really starting to irritate me, and I could feel a bitter mood descending on me that just got worse each time Andi smiled at me. As classes resumed after lunch, I started to get more and more withdrawn, eventually getting to the point that I fervently started wishing that I could have even just a little bit of privacy. Ironically, this desire to be left alone actually helped me stick to my plan of not drawing attention to myself, at least until the last class of the day, when it all fell apart. Spectacularly.

The class was Science, and it had actually started out well, mostly because I was finally able to focus clearly without Andi in the room to distract me. I sat listening to Mr. Hamm drone on about the wonders of science in a tiresome tone of voice that made it seem anything but wondrous.

Seriously. How had I fallen in love with science in high school with this guy as its ambassador?

It was at this point that Hamm started talking negatively about renewable energy and how it just wasn't going to be sufficient because of its limited power output and the extreme cost, meaning that it just couldn't ever be an appropriate alternative for our future power needs. In other words, he lectured, by the turn of the millennium, we would all be completely and totally screwed.

"We're going to need another source of energy if we are going to be able to survive the glacier advancement and downturn in global temperatures that many scientists have claimed are on the way," he preached. "And unless aliens arrive out of the blue and offer us a magic solution, we'll be out of luck."

Inwardly, I laughed at what Hamm was saying, remembering now his frequent lectures on the subject. He was one of those environmentally-minded teachers who wanted to scare us all into fearing the future so that we'd be more motivated to do something about it. I hadn't liked it then, and I liked it even less having actually lived in that future this guy wanted us to fear. Oh sure, it was bad. But not for any of the reasons that this idiot was freaking out over.

That's when, without thinking, I put my hand up and, without even waiting to be called on, I said, "What about the more distant future? Won't things change with technological advancements?"

Hamm sputtered self-importantly in response, clearly not used to being interrupted, much less challenged, before answering, "Well... um, perhaps, but it would take centuries. If not more. And we don't have nearly that long."

"No," I said curtly, cutting across him. "It's more like a couple of decades," My voice was growing louder now, driven in part by the frustration that had been building in me all afternoon. "The growth in renewable energy technology will be exponential once the costs start to come down, and those costs will drop in inverse proportion to the efficiency. Once this starts to happen in earnest, then we'll start to notice a significant reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions that are _warming_ the Earth, not cooling it."

I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere in the middle, I stopped talking about hypotheticals, and started talking about what actually had happened.

"Solar cells will remain about as efficient as they are now in terms of conversion rates, but we'll find ways to make them smaller so we don't need such large arrays, and we will even start to use lenses to focus and direct the strength of the sun. Then, once we have the kind of high-efficiency batteries that can store the power being generated, we can finally get past the problem of solar only being useful when the sun is actually shining.

"As for wind, the real advances will be with turbines that are designed specifically to operate only occasionally during typhoons where enough power to sustain a city for a year is released over an afternoon. Those will be quite common by the early 2020s. Then there's the tidal energy of places like the Bay of Fundy where they will eventually build an underwater grouping with the potential to power a large portion of the Maritimes.

"And then there are other power sources right under our very noses that we'll eventually learn to tap into, like turbines on large water mains in cities, or even on our taps at home. Then there's wave, geo-thermal, and thermoelectric energy—just to name a few. In time, each one of these parts of the solution is going to contribute to a larger whole."

All around me, things had frozen more solid than that time I found out that an aging body needs a healthy intake of liquids to keep the digestive system moving. Nobody in the lab so much as stirred as I ranted, and Hamm himself was standing there slack-jawed at the prospect of an upstart seventeen-year-old lecturing him in his own classroom. The same seventeen-year-old that had been too shy to say much of anything at all just a few days before.

"You're right in that there is not just one solution," I continued unabated. "There are _many_ solutions, and they will all have to be used co-operatively." I was beginning to slow down, well aware that I'd already crossed a line but, off in the distance I could hear him trying to interrupt me by telling me that I was just an ignorant kid and didn't know what I was talking about. This just fired me up even more so I held my hand up, palm facing him to silence him, the way I used to do it with my kids. Amazingly, it worked—at least for a moment.

"All in all _Sir_ , you're just part of a problem that's gonna get worse before it gets better. You could be using your position of authority to inspire these kids. To work to improve the future, but instead, you've decided to have an ego trip, and you're _scaring_ them instead. You're making them fear the future, so that the only way they'll be able to prepare for it is by following your example and stuffing their collective heads up their collective asses!"

Perhaps predictably, at this, the kids that I'd just referred to as a collective, gasped collectively. I ignored it and plowed on.

"The truth is, you can't always prepare for what's coming, but you can _inspire_ this generation to be optimistic that things will turn out well no matter what takes place. Engage and inspire them, don't berate and belittle them!"

Hamm's shock was finally melting away, and he was walking towards me now, telling me to stop, but I just kept talking over him.

"I mean, don't get me wrong, I know what you're doing. Or, at least what you think you're doing. You're trying to scare people into doing something about the environment. You figure that fear will motivate them, but it doesn't and it won't. All you're doing is planting the seeds for a generation of people who will be scared of everything and paralyzed by the expectation of impending doom. People like that can't be reasoned with. People like that can't be motivated. People like that will flock in droves to the mouthpieces that deny that there's anything wrong."

I was packing up my things now, knowing even as I spoke that I'd gone too far to walk back on it now.

"Inspire them sir," I pleaded. "Give them something to hope for, something to aspire to."

Everyone was applauding now, but I only heard part of it because I was already walking out the door in the direction indicated by Hamm's bony finger. The last thing I heard him say as he shut the door to his classroom loudly behind me was, "You don't know the future! Nobody does!"

"You're wrong about that too, you myopic asshat," I muttered quietly enough so that none of the students and teachers who had been gathering outside the room to hear what all the yelling was about could hear me, and stalked off down the hallway, a decidedly intemperate mood settling comfortably onto my now-slumping shoulders. Were I still in my sixties, my disposition would have been described as "curmudgeonly" and I had to admit that it suited me. All at once, the thrill of being back here in my own past gave way to the frustration that I was no longer being deferred to because of my greater age and experience, and that I was lacking even the most basic of freedoms.

_So much for being surreptitious and playing along quietly_ , I thought, but I was well past caring that I'd blown my cover at this point.

I spent the rest of the last period in the vice-principal's office with Mr. Barker staring at me, not sure what to say since this kind of thing was, suffice it to say, completely and wholly out of character for my younger self. I didn't help things by sitting there sullenly, arms crossed and answering his questions in a manner that was detached and aloof, making me seem, perhaps ironically, like a petulant teenager with a chip on his shoulder. He was trying to lecture me, but I'd tuned most of it out because I was still technically older than this wet-behind-the-ears Vice Principal, and this whole thing was a waste of my fucking time.

Besides, there wasn't much he could say to make me feel worse than I was making myself feel. I had broken my own pledge to keep a low profile today, and my outburst would have repercussions, especially once my father found out, and I didn't want him angry at me. So, when I finally left Barker's office in time to go to my locker to get my things before catching my bus, my mood was even more unpleasant.

I was grabbing my jacket and unhooking my book bag from my locker when Andi walked up with a grim look on her face.

"You heard?" I asked her as I angrily shoved a binder into my Adidas bag.

" _Everybody's_ heard, Josh," she said in response as she reached out timidly to put a hand on my bicep, even as she tried to lighten the mood. "From what I hear, Hamm's locked himself in his office and is yelling at his DNA model. I've even heard talk that people want you to run for Student Council now."

I snorted at this.

"How was Barker?" she asked.

"Says he was lenient considering this is a first offense and so out of character for me," I said, scoffing. "He's 'letting me off easy' with a week's worth of detentions."

Letting me off easy, my wrinkled ass.

"Well, it could have been worse, I suppose," offered Andi, gently.

Rounding on her, I barked, "Worse? Getting kicked out would have been a hell of a lot better, believe me! This whole masquerade is a waste of my fucking time!"

Instead of backing down, or responding in kind with an outburst of her own, Andi stood her ground, and asked me, sternly, "What's going on with you, Josh? Really." There were tiny tears forming in the corners of her eyes, but instead of inspiring sympathy in me, it just enraged me more.

Why the hell couldn't she just leave me the hell alone? This is difficult enough as it is, without her throwing herself at me every time I turn around!

All at once, I realized what frustrated me the most about Andi, the beautiful young woman standing in front of me who was, even now, struggling not to cry. _She was just so goddamned perfect!_ Everything about her was just so fucking faultless! She was the epitome of the "Mary Sue" stereotype that you hated simply because she was absurdly competent and was an expert in things she had no right being an expert in.

Part of me knew that it was irrational to blame her for my being tempted to break wedding vows that, strictly speaking, I hadn't even made yet, but a different, darker part of me was in charge at the moment. This darker part of me was telling me that I'd already had my chance, and that breaking up with her all those years back had been my biggest mistake. And, for some reason, it just made the mistake I'd made today all that much worse because it had a companion.

Seriously, this dark voice was saying, who cared if this was an opportunity to go back and do it all over again when I could still remember how I'd screwed it all up the first time! My whole life had been a pale comparison of what it could have been if I hadn't dumped Andi all those years ago. I had married Heather because she kind of reminded me of Andi and, although we'd had some good times, I had always—ALWAYS—secretly wished it had gone differently.

All at once, being back here was just a reminder of just how selfish and short-sighted I had been in my youth, because so far, almost everything I'd experienced being back here had been a stark reminder of just how goddammed idyllic this young woman was, and how enamoured she was with a boy who just wasn't worth it.

I just couldn't stand seeing Andi right now, and I could only think of one way to get rid of her so, sighing irritably, I finally answered. "Trust me, you wouldn't understand, and I really don't have the energy to explain myself to a child."

Beside me, Andi froze, the tears fully-formed in her eyes, her hand gripping my arm tightly enough to bruise it.

"You really are an arrogant son of a bitch sometimes, Donegal," she said, coldly, before spinning in place and charging away down the hall.

I watched her go out of the corner of my eye, already regretting what I'd said, but still too incensed to do anything about it other than glower at her.

This just keeps getting better and better.

The bus ride was quiet. Patrick had, of course, heard all about my meltdown and, instead of bringing it up, he just let me stew in silence, even going so far as to shoo away other kids who wanted to ask me about it.

When I got home, my father was waiting for the bus, standing outside the open overhead door to his workshop. He was eerily calm, which was his worst state of anger. As a kid, it had scared me silly, but now, well... mentally, I was older than he'd ever be. He might look like the authority figure at the moment, but from my perspective, he was Matheson having a temper tantrum. In fact, as I moved closer to my father, this was the first time that I fully appreciated how much my son had grown up to look like his Grandfather. What's more, that look of heated disappointment on Dad's face was almost a carbon copy of the look on Mat's face back in 2035 (at which point, Mat would have been about the same age that my father was here in 1985) when I told him that I was leaving the _Pucks_ on Oskar's hair-brained scheme to follow the power cables.

Dad sent Patrick inside and stood glaring at me, ignoring the "Oooooo, you're in trouble now..." that my brother had directed at me before slipping inside the house. What my father hadn't seen was the thumbs up that Patrick had flashed me before he closed the front door behind him. It was his way of giving me some much-needed moral support.

"What the hell's up with you lately, Josh?" Dad growled quietly. "Are you on drugs?"

I actually laughed out loud at this. "Dad, no. It's not that. It's just... well, Hamm's an idiot."

"I _know_ he's an idiot," my father said, surprising me. "I used to play poker with him. We all know he's an idiot but that's not what I'm worried about. It's you. Since when do you talk back to your teachers? For that matter, since when do you hug me and your Mom in the morning like you haven't seen us in years? Since when do you know how to fix a motion sensor? Since when do you..." he paused, not sure what words to use. "Well, do you do whatever the hell it was you were doing this morning?"

As I stood looking up at my father, who was clearly disappointed in me, I suddenly didn't feel old anymore. All at once, I was a reckless teenager again and, like a pricked balloon, my anger deflated completely and absolutely. I still hadn't fully decided if this whole damn time-slip was permanent, much less real, but suddenly it didn't matter. Illusion or not, this version of my father cared for me, and what I was doing was concerning him. It was causing him pain. I didn't want to cause any incarnation of my father pain, not when we'd finally been reunited, against every conceivable odd in the universe.

I let out a long breath and finally relaxed my shoulders.

"Dad, I'm sorry. I'm not on drugs it's just that... well, do you know what an epiphany is?"

"God damn it kid, I know what an epiphany is."

I smiled and put my hand on his elbow as I looked directly at him. "Well, I've had one. A _big_ one. And I'm having a hard time sorting out what it all means. There are so many new possibilities for me, and I'm feeling a confidence I didn't have at seventeen." He cocked his eyebrows at my gaffe, and I tried to backtrack. "... _before_. I mean confidence I never had _before_. Please. I just need some time to find my feet again. I'm not doing drugs. I'm not going to run off to find Jesus or join a circus."

He stared at me a moment. "There have got to be better ways to express this... this new 'confidence' of yours," he countered finally, emphasizing the word as if he didn't believe it.

"Well, maybe," I answered. "But you raised me to trust my own judgement and to stand up in the face of bullshit." My father's mouth twitched a little at this as if it wanted to form a smile. "Well Hamm personifies that, and I just couldn't take it anymore. I spoke my mind today, just like you always do when you know someone is lying, or trying to take advantage of you." This was true. My father had an acid tongue when he felt he was being played for a fool, and a biting wit when he was fired up and inspired. With my bedroom above his home office, I could always tell when he was typing an angry letter, because he hammered each key of the manual typewriter so forcefully that I was sure that every single embossed letter was breaking through the paper. Alluding to this aspect of his personality to justify my having done something similar and, in effect, turning it back on him was a desperate gamble, but it appeared to be mollifying my father, who was finally looking a lot less irate.

"I promise," I continued. "Next time I express my newfound confidence, I'll be more subtle about it."

My father stared closely at each of my eyes in turn, giving me the impression that he was studying them closely to see if they were suspiciously dilated. Finally, he said, "Fine. Just no more phone calls from Hamm. He's an idiot." Then he turned and started to walk back into his workshop before speaking over his shoulder. "Your mother doesn't need the car tonight. You can take it to work."

"Work," I answered, as if I had just invented the word. "Right. I _work_ tonight." It was supposed to sound like I was stating the obvious confidently, but inside I was freaked out. Add this to the list of the many things that I'd completely forgotten about since my recent time-shift. In my teens, I worked part-time at _Duckies_ , a local convenience store. Apparently, I was in for a crash-course tonight on how to operate an 80s-era cash register.

Son of a bitch. This just kept getting better and better.

The last thing I heard my father mutter before firing up his table-saw were the words "collective asses." And then, I swear to God, the man actually smiled.

back to top

#  Chapter 6

## Saturday

Well, this morning marks the beginning of the third day in my own past. When I woke up, the first thing I did (again) was to check to make sure I hadn't come unstuck in time while I had been sleeping. And, as far as I could tell, time was proceeding, if not normally, then at least predictably and consistently in the correct chronological sequence and pace.

Last night's sleep was actually the best that I'd had in a long time, and it even included an added bonus, something I hadn't experienced since my teens: a wet dream. These teenage hormones might have even been fun to feel again at any other time, but now they were just so frikkin' distracting! I was having a difficult enough time fitting in at home and at school without my mind drifting off every six or seven minutes to fantasize about things like the swimsuit models on the back of my bedroom door coming to life and showing me their gratitude. And I wasn't alone either. It was like the entire student population was swimming naked in a vat of a powerful military-grade aphrodisiacs, and they were all just letting their bodies follow their natural, primal urges as they...

See! There I go again. Knock it off Josh! Focus already!

My shift at _Duckies_ yesterday evening had gone pretty well, all things considered. Interestingly, the hardest part hadn't actually been figuring out how to use a cash register again as I'd expected, but had instead been remembering how to drive the car to get there! From my perspective, it had been over a decade since I'd last operated a real car, or at least something that hadn't been part of an OVUM simulacrum. Luckily, it was a lot like riding a bike, in that it came back to me pretty quickly.

When I got to the corner store, I chatted for a while with Charlotte, the employee I was taking over for. I guided the conversation to make it seem like we were commiserating about the downsides of part-time shift-work, while casually prompting her to offer up examples of her experience with various aspects of working retail. In the course of the discussion, I admitted to her that I'd never really gotten the hang of the tax button on the cash register, and sometimes wasn't sure what items we were supposed to apply tax to and which ones were exempt. As I'd hoped, this motivated her to demonstrate the proper technique on the machine, a process that involved revealing a great deal more about how it worked. Charlotte also encouraged me to refer to the instructions again, which was a great reminder that we actually had documentation that the owner had prepared so that each of the employees knew what they were doing.

Once Charlotte left, I immediately pulled out the instructions and scanned them quickly to make sure that I wasn't in over my head. There were customers in the store at that point, but I was feeling pretty confident, especially once I found the last page with the list of phone numbers that I could call with questions.

A few customers later, I found that, just like driving, it all came back to me pretty quickly. It was about this time that I noticed something else. My foul mood, that had mostly disappeared during Dad's lecture, had actually turned into an excited exhilaration, due entirely to an idea that had occurred to me once I had been afforded an opportunity between customers to contemplate the potential of my situation.

The whole experience of standing up to Hamm by telling him that his prediction of the future was wrong because I secretly knew better had got me thinking about something that I'd only heretofore briefly considered. If I knew what the future was bringing, and if this time-displacement of mine was permanent, then could I use my knowledge of the future to effect positive change in this timeline?

The possibilities actually kind of excited me. How much could I do? Could I curb climate change? Stop 9/11 and the litany of wars that followed it? Keep Trump from getting elected?

Oh God. Could I actually stop the events of 2025? Could I stop the pandemic?

My eyes actually teared up a bit as I thought about this last possibility. This was all the balm I needed to assuage the festering sores that were the negative, self-punishing thoughts of guilt that had tortured me earlier that day. The voices went away completely once I had begun to consider that maybe the reason that I had slipped back in time when nobody else had, was because I had some significant role to play in fixing the future.

Once I began to feel better about that problem, I turned my attention towards what to do about Andi. Clearly, I had let my frustration get the better of me earlier in the day, and I had taken it out on her, mostly, out of reflex. It wasn't something that I liked admitting, but this wasn't something that was out of character for me because, it had, in fact, been exactly how I had treated Celeste in the first five or six years of our marriage.

To be fair, when Celeste and I had been joined in 2027, we'd both recently lost loved ones. Celeste's parents had perished in the events of 2025 and my first wife, Heather had lost her battle with breast cancer just eight months before that. In those early years of our time together, Celeste harboured a certain animosity towards me because I was significantly older than her. As for me, well I resented her... well, simply for not being Heather. It hadn't been easy, but we persisted, and even developed a certain fondness for each other—eventually.

And now, it felt like it was happening all over again for me, no matter how many times I told myself that it was different. I knew deep down that the biggest part of the reason that I was pushing Andi away was because of the perceived age difference of fifty years between us. It was making me decidedly uncomfortable although, admittedly, this discomfort had taken a remarkably short time to fade as I'd gotten more and more used to being physically seventeen again.

Could a marriage bond even survive time-travel? Not that it mattered really because, as I reminded myself, for the second time in as many days, Celeste and I had said our goodbyes with the expectation that we would likely never see each other again. Once she found out what Oskar had asked me to do, she'd told me to go—begged me even—even though she knew that it meant that she would have to go into hiding. She told me that she'd be fine on her own and that she had Mat, Suki and the kids to watch out for her.

I knew that I couldn't very well tell Andi any of this, but it did help me to understand how I was feeling about her, and also how to potentially resolve the quarrel that I'd created. So, a few hours later, after I'd locked up the store and gone through the closing procedure according to the, somewhat familiar, instructions, I called Andi from the store phone. It had been something that we used to do all the time because it had been our only real opportunity for a private conversation, or at least one where my father wasn't checking in on me every ten minutes to see if his line was still tied up. Andi picked up right away, as if she had been expecting the call.

"Josh?" she said quietly.

"It's me," I answered.

"I'm sorry for upsetting you today," she said before I had a chance to say anything. This was typical Andi, always apologizing for things that weren't her fault just to keep the peace. It was a defence mechanism that I now know she adopted to deal with two emotionally distant and narcissistic parents, but it didn't make me feel any better knowing that I'd taken advantage of it more than a few times in our relationship. But not anymore. I was determined to do things better now so, before she could say anything else, I interrupted her as gently as I could.

"Andi. Please... just stop right there. You've got nothing to apologize for. This was all on me. I'm the one who should be sorry. I was wrong, and I apologize." From the gasp I heard through the line as I spoke, and the silence that endured afterwards, I knew that I'd just shocked Andi. The seventeen-year-old me that she knew didn't like to say sorry. He didn't like being wrong. Being able to admit wrongdoing was a skill that had taken me decades to learn.

Andi still hadn't said anything, but I could hear her breathing so, taking advantage of her loss for words, I just kept talking and told her the truth about why I'd barked at her in front of my locker, having decided that the truth (or at least a small portion thereof) was the best course of action. I explained that my outburst was due in large part because I was angry at myself for losing control with Hamm and she was the closest target, but it was also paradoxically because she was just so perfect and that I was constantly feeling like I wasn't worthy and couldn't live up to her, and couldn't be everything she needed.

Abruptly, she spoke up, cutting across me. "Josh. Just stop talking and come pick me up, OK? I can still go out for a while, especially if it's with you. I can't... I can't have this conversation over the phone."

I didn't hesitate. "I'll be right there."

Ten minutes later, Andi was sitting beside me in the car, and we were driving around town aimlessly. We didn't really have much to say about our argument at first, and instead just enjoyed being together. Eventually, we found ourselves in the parking lot above the Hermann gravel pit a few miles east of town, uncharacteristically empty of party-goers tonight, and put the back seat of the hatchback down so that we could look up at the moon and the stars through the back window—at least until it fogged up. As we held each other, I apologized again and we both cried. There in the dark of the car, her olive skin glowing in the soft pale light of the moon, I finally felt fully present in my own past. No longer was I feeling torn between my future and my new present. In fact, until Andi was holding me, I hadn't even realized how very lost I'd been feeling the last few days. I was literally a man out of time. I was in a place where I didn't really belong anymore and, despite how familiar it was, I was still a stranger to it, and it to me. Andi's embrace had finally grounded me, giving me shelter and welcoming me home.

We eventually stopped talking entirely and just started kissing, and I felt like I was tumbling through time all over again at the sensation of it all.

About a half hour later, I was kissing her goodbye reluctantly outside of her door, cursing inwardly at having to accept the rules that a teenager living at home had to abide by, like curfews. I had been resisting Andi's affections for so long, but suddenly, I couldn't get enough of them. The porch light flashed, signaling that it was time for me to go, so I hugged Andi one last time and said, "Goodnight Andi. I love you."

"Love you too, Josh," she replied. "See you tomorrow at 5? Phoebe and Brock will be here at the house, and we can go to the restaurant in Brock's car."

Nodding by way of an answer, ignoring something that was tickling the back of mind in reference to Brock's car, I gave her one last peck on her check, and slipped away down the porch steps.

This resolution of our conflict had certainly helped me get a better night's sleep, and this morning, I actually slept-in until around five-thirty, proving that my mind was definitely adjusting to the body of a teenager! I started the day with some stretching and Tai Chi movements, something that I hadn't actually had an opportunity to do for... how long had it been? Months, at least for my mind, but it was definitely the first time I'd ever done anything like it with this younger frame. This body was definitely a lot softer in terms of musculature, but the focus and the mindfulness of the exercise helped center me nonetheless.

A short while later, I went downstairs and joined my father for breakfast. The moment I appeared at the base of the stairs he glowered at me a little, even as Chance bounded over to welcome me enthusiastically. After yesterday's conversation, things were still kinda tense with Dad, and me being up this early of my own volition was still, as far as he was concerned, wholly unheard of for me.

"'morning Dad," I said as I sniffed at his coffee covetously (maybe I could sneak a full mug later when he was gone). "What's on your agenda today?"

My father cleared his throat as his eyebrows furrowed briefly. Yes, I knew that this would have been out of character for me fifty years ago: me talking to my father like this. How could I tell the man that, after losing him some twenty years in my past, I would have been happy just to spend every waking minute with him in this freaky alternate reality, just asking all the questions I wished I'd have asked him before he'd died?

As my father told me about the work he was planning in the workshop today, and the errands he had to run, I went to the fridge to pull out some eggs.

That's when it hit me.

We had bacon!

How is it that it's taken me two whole days to realize this?

"We have bacon!" I announced excitedly, interrupting my father, who had started to glare at me again, no doubt beginning to disbelieve my claim at being drug-free again.

"It's just that I haven't had bacon in years!" I added without thinking. Again, I was just happy to be able to have conversations with my father again. I still hadn't figured out what I should and shouldn't say. He was, after all as far as I was concerned, some twenty-five years younger than me.

Dammit, he should be respecting his elders, not contemplating grounding them!

"We had it last weekend," he said suspiciously.

"Well, it just _seems_ like years then," I countered defensively as I did the math in my head, trying to figure out the last time I'd eaten it. From my perspective, it had been about eleven years. All pork products had, of course, all but disappeared after the pandemic of 2025, for obvious reasons. "It's bacon. We should be eating it every day!"

I almost started crying again once the bacon started cooking and I could smell it, and I could barely wait for it to cool before I started sampling it. When I sat down beside my father a short while later, my plate was loaded with several fried eggs, some home fries, and every piece of bacon that had been in the fridge—close to half a package. Naturally, Chance was sitting right beside me, her envious eye on my overflowing plate, hoping that some of it would find its way accidentally to her. I tried not to swoon as I ate it all (Spoiler alert: I did ultimately share some of it with my faithful Golden Retriever who had the cutest set of puppy dog eyes in the world), because I was pretty sure that my father was watching me suspiciously again.

"Hey," I said, between mouthfuls, while also trying to distract from my table manners. "Do you mind if I use the car this morning? I have a few errands."

"Check with your Mother," Dad answered. "She might need it to get to her _coffee club_." My father said these last two words as if they were somehow distasteful. The coffee club was a group of women that met several times a week at the local _Stedman's_ lunch counter. Dad disliked them, assuming that they only ever got together to gossip.

Sure enough, when I asked my Mother a couple of minutes later, she did have plans to meet up with her friends, but not until about noon. That would give me plenty of time to run my errands first thing in the morning, and be back to give her the car.

When I got into town a few hours later, I went straight to the lone stationery store in Robertson. The moment I walked into the building, and saw the reams of paper against the back wall, I stopped short. Paper was one of the many things that we had to ration on the island, so it still felt unfamiliar to see that much of it in one place, so inexpensively priced and with nary an armed guard in sight.

As I stood there gawking, an older woman I didn't recognize greeted me like an old friend and started asking me familiar questions that I probably should have been able to answer. I muddled through some feeble replies, wishing beyond hope that I had had a smartphone in my pocket that I could pretend was ringing to get out of the situation. Eventually extracting myself for the conversation, I grabbed a couple of nice pens (a long time ago, I had learned to despise cheap pens, because, if I was going to write something, I might as well be using something that feels good in my hand while I'm doing it) and picked out a thick hardcover notebook (a long time ago, I had learned to despise cheap notebooks, because, if I was going to be putting my ideas somewhere, it might as well be on a product that was well-made). The notebook was more expensive than the more basic varieties there on the shelf beside it, but I was planning on using it for something important, and didn't think that a spiral notebook had the right amount of gravitas.

It was when I got to the cash, standing under the handmade sign advertising the store's new "Faxing Service" that I opened my wallet and looked at the very lonely looking ten-dollar bill within it.

_Nuts_ , I wondered at a completely inopportune time, as I stared into a near empty wallet. _How am I going to pay for my date tonight with Andi?_

It had completely slipped my mind that I had to have enough physical money to be able to pay for my purchase as well as go out tonight. This kind of basic budgeting was suddenly very alien to me. For the last decade of my life on the island, physical money didn't really exist. In fact, our economy was almost completely barter for anything that the _Ensee_ didn't provide.

Standing there with the cashier wondering what I was doing, I realized that I'd completely forgotten that debit transactions were a thing of the future. In 1985, you went to the bank in person on Friday to withdraw all of the money that you anticipated that you would need for the weekend. If you didn't withdraw enough, then you were out of luck.

Oh crap—banks.

How the hell did you take money out of a bank in 1985 before ATMs? I seemed to recall that you went into the actual building, filled out a form with your account number (something that I'd have no hope in hell of remembering) and all the pertinent details, and then waited in line to present it to a teller who would then ask how your mother was as she counted out your money.

It was at this point that I was rescued by the cashier, a young woman who I had finally figured out, by what she'd been saying to me, was a friend of the family. Hell, Robertson was such a small town, that everyone was a friend of the family in one way or another. I was likely insulting her by not using her name.

"Did you want to put this on your father's account?" she asked, having obviously been looking into the same near-empty wallet I was dumb-foundedly holding open in front of her. "Like last time?"

My father ran a construction business, and had accounts at most of the stores in town. In fact, he'd admonished me once for buying a three-holed punch on my own and not putting it on credit at this very stationery store so that he could have claimed it on his taxes. Naturally, in response to this request, and much to his regret, I immediately went out and charged a very expensive scientific calculator to his name. I'm guessing that this past event had actually happened fairly recently if this, increasingly familiar looking young woman, was asking me to do it again.

"Um, sure," I muttered as I returned my wallet to my back pocket, happy that there was nobody else standing behind me in line.

As I stood watching the cashier pull out some kind of ledger from under the counter, I wondered if I would be able to borrow money from my father for tonight. Or, maybe my mother instead, since Dad would no doubt want to lecture me on the importance of financial planning. If he only knew that such planning was a complete waste of time with what awaited us. But that was in the future, and this is now. How much would I need for Chinese Food and a movie in 1985? Would $80 be enough? While I was in town, I was going to have to check out some prices so that I would know what to expect.

_Wait, do I even have to pay tonight? Did Brock pick up the tab in the original timeline? Damn, I can't remember._ In fact, my only clear recollection of the evening was that the annoying yuppie needing us to sit at a table by the window so that he could keep an eye on his Jag in case a passer-by looked at it too intently or something. Oh, and there was something about the actual Jag too, but that wasn't completely clear.

I thanked Melanie for her help (serendipitously, somebody had called her by name from the back of the store while she was doing the paperwork for my purchase), and walked out of the stationery store and onto the street. It was a bright sunny day, and I stood on the near-empty sidewalk sniffing at the spring air and marvelling at just how much sky there was here in Robertson. Trees didn't get very tall up north, and neither did the buildings, something that had always made me feel exposed to the elements whenever I'd come back to visit the town in my adulthood.

After stashing my recent purchases in the car, I decided that, since I had enough time left, I'd wander around a bit. The stationery store was on a side street that intersected with Robertson's main street, the chief thoroughfare through the town that also acted as the business core. This three-block section of town housed most of its storefronts, commercial businesses, and public gathering places, meaning that you could usually find a very large percentage of Robertson's population milling about here, especially on a Saturday morning when most people were off work.

It took me about a half hour to walk up one side of the street and down the other, during which I browsed in store windows and nodded at the people I passed on the sidewalk, and even stuck my head into our town's sole Chinese restaurant to take a quick look at the menu so I knew what to expect in terms of both food and prices tonight. It was when I was approaching the town's local library that it occurred to me that I might be able to get some answers to some of my questions, mostly about what the _Ensee_ was up to in 1985. One of the things that I wanted to detail in my new journal was the critical role that the _Ensee_ would play on the island in the wake of 2025, so it made sense that I look into their history. What better way to do that from here, some fifty years back into that very history?

The _Ensee_ was an acronym that had pretty much universally been adopted in reference to the huge corporation known officially as _The Naffarium Collective._ Personally, I hadn't really become aware of them until sometime in the 2010s even though they had apparently been operating quietly in the background of North American corporate culture since the 60s. As for what they actually did as a company, well that was another topic altogether. They were most famous simply for acquiring and assimilating other companies into their greater whole. In fact, the _Ensee_ would eventually became known colloquially as "the Borg," in reference to the infamous race of augmented beings from _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ that would absorb other species into its hive mind to make the collective that much stronger. This association was made dangerously explicit on the island when the underground Resistance first began to publicly defy the _Ensee's_ authoritarian rule by covering walls with graffiti declaring, "Beware the Borg".

It was only after I'd walked through the door and into the library, and was staring at the squat stacks behind the welcome desk that I realized that, without an internet search engine, or at the very least, some kind of dedicated library computer terminal, I was at a loss as to how to search for something.

There used to be narrow drawers full of index cards right?

Trying not to look conspicuous, I meandered into the stacks while nodding robotically at a few of the patrons as well as the woman behind the counter, all of which had me at a disadvantage in that they knew who I was, but they were but an unfocused memory to me.

Damn. What I wouldn't give for a smartphone with facial recognition software right about now.

I browsed a few of the shelves that were obviously dedicated to new releases (from the likes of Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steele) as I scanned the room for the drawer system. Once I finally spotted the cabinet, my memories of having used it came back to me immediately. Not so much _how_ to use it mind you, but definitely the memory of once having used it.

After about ten minutes of fruitless searching, the librarian (whom I eventually figured out was named Madame Beauclair) came over to offer her assistance.

" _The Naffarium Collective_ ," she said after I'd explained what I'd been looking for. "Can't say that they sound familiar at all. They're a company?"

"One of the biggest," I answered. "Or at least they will be."

If she noticed my temporal gaffe, she ignored it. "Have you tried the _Who's Who of Companies_?" she asked as she tottered off towards the Reference area. I took the huge tome she eventually returned with and retreated to a table in the corner of the book-shelved room to browse through it. Over the next hour, Madame Beauclair fed me a steady diet of books and magazines that she thought might have the information I was looking for but, in the end, I had to admit defeat. I couldn't find any reference anywhere to the Collective, nor any of the major corporations that Oskar would one day connect to the larger whole. Even the CEO, Remmus Kemp, was unknown.

From what little I knew about the _Ensee's_ history, I was pretty sure that, in this time period, the company was operating out of hundreds (if not thousands) of small, decentralized hubs spread out around the Globe. None of them shared the same company name, so none of them could be associated with any other, yet they all worked in tandem, like a flock of birds murmuring. It was a mystery how they managed to act so cohesively and in concert in an era that was decades before a communications and information system like the World Wide Web had appeared.

Thanking Madame Beauclair, and promising to give my best to my mother, I left the library, blinking at the bright sunlight that greeted me after the dimmed environment of the book stacks. Continuing my walk along the street, I soon found myself standing in front of _PJ's_ arcade. For a moment, I stood in front of the squat, slightly run-down building, not sure whether I should go in.

Although I had never been very good at arcade games in the 80s (or ever, really), I absolutely loved going to _PJ's_ —the cultural hub of my teen years—and watching others play. This wasn't where I saw my first saw arcade games, mind you. That would have been on a trip to Florida in the early 80s, when I'd seen an _Asteroids_ console and begged my father to give me a quarter so that I could play it, even though I had no idea how. As he watched each of my tiny triangular ships (which I would later find out were called vector graphics), get blown apart one after the other in short order by jagged, irregularly shaped, polygons not more than a minute or two after I'd started the game, he famously quipped, "Well, that was a good use of my quarter now wasn't it?"

The funny thing was, this wasn't the only time that this kind of thing had happened to me. I'd had an almost identical experience with _Pac-Man_ a few years later, but this time it was my own quarter that I'd sacrificed as I ate my way through the maze with absolutely no idea why I kept dying when the ghosts touched me and why they occasionally turned blue. I had never been one to read instructions ahead of time, much to the chagrin of both my wives.

Although there were four or five dedicated arcades in Robertson, _PJ's_ was by far the most popular and was owned by a young man who wasn't really that much older than me. He'd graduated a few years back and had decided to open an arcade and give it the nickname that he himself had been given in Grade 10 when he'd worn pajamas to school one day.

_PJ's_ arcade really was the best. Not only did it always have the best selection of coin-op games that changed monthly, but it also had an awesome lunch counter with the absolute best fries in town. In high school, it was where my friends and I hung out. When we weren't playing in the arcade, we were eating fries and burgers at the counter in the next room and planning out our next Video Recital.

When I finally walked in (figuring I still had most of an hour left), it was the smell of delicious hot grease that hit me first and, without even thinking about it, I was ordering an extra-large order of fries from PJ himself. While I waited for it, I wandered into the arcade where I was overwhelmed by computerized beeps and sound effects mixed with the din of excited kids arguing with joysticks. The place was busy even on a Saturday morning, full of teen-agers I kinda recognized, but who were thankfully too involved in their games to challenge me to name them. I walked around the room and looked at everything like it was my first time there, even though it had almost been my second home for a time. This was the first place I'd seen the awesome graphics of _Donkey Kong_ and _Pole Position_ , or a person using the _Pac-Man_ pattern, or watched a friend master _Joust_ by not straying from the sweet spot, or watched somebody loose a ship on purpose in _Galaga_ in order to get more firepower when he got it back later in the game.

For years, I'd harboured the fantasy of being able to walk into this arcade with a whole ten-dollar roll of quarters and just go nuts. I never did it though, because I knew it wouldn't last nearly as long as it should have, what with my lousy hand-eye coordination, so I just spent most of my time here watching others play. Maybe now I would finally have a chance to live out that simple fantasy, even though the appeal was somewhat diminished because I'd come from a future when I'd been able to play each and every one of these games for free online as much as I'd wanted to. Not that this made me any better at playing them though, which dashed my other fantasy of coming into this arcade with skills I'd honed in the future and become some kind of arcade hero.

When I left _PJ's_ a little while later, I was grinning ear to ear as I ate fresh-cut fries out of a box-board container covered in grease stains that was wedged between the two front seats of the car for easy access. The fries were moist, and covered in an almost obscene amount of salt and ketchup—dressed up in a manner I'd loved as a kid, but avoided as an adult, especially once I had become aware of something called "blood pressure." I savoured each and every fry, even though this particular vegetable certainly hadn't been in short supply on Prince Edward Island in the future, unlike some other foods.

I took my time getting home, knowing that I still had a full half-hour. I rolled the windows down to let in the crisp spring air, and toured my hometown of Robertson, waving at people who were getting more and more recognisable every hour, and seeing places and things that triggered one fond memory after another. Apparently, the person who said that you can't go home again didn't know about time travel.

Every square inch of this town had some kind of memory associated with it and, as I drove, it was like I could actually see my former self there, physically acting out each one of those memories. I could see my juvenile figure out on _Shelter Bay_ in winter stumbling around awkwardly on skates, and in summer learning how to swim and being scared to death of the high diving board. Here I was a little older and carrying a guitar to the community center for lessons (which brought with it the olfactory memory of the sweetly acrid, yet totally addictive, smell of photocopies in the 70s), and there I was going door to door selling chocolates, candles, or apples to raise money for one school activity or another. I was riding my bike through a dusty field, building a fort in a secluded area of Hilltop park, getting bullied on a street corner, slipping into a corner store to get an ice cream cone, cramming way too many friends into a tiny car, or standing high up on a snowbank watching the big carnival parade go by while catching candy being thrown by a clown.

There were so many ghosts here. All of them my former self at one point or another in my life and now, through some kind of trick of fate, I was actually one of those ghosts, remembering things that had happened to me even though many of them had yet to actually occur.

Now, I'd never really been one to wax nostalgic, even more so in a future where looking back on an idyllic past was actually quite painful, but I had to admit that I was enjoying being back in Robertson, for the first time in some thirty years. The closest I'd been to driving these familiar roads was the time I'd used Google maps, back when there was a full-fledged internet, and when it was still world-wide. At the time, I struggled to remember a lot of what I was seeing. I wasn't sure at the time if it was because I'd forgotten it, or if it was because it had just changed so much. Now, back in time, with things exactly the way they'd been, I'm realizing that it was a bit of both.

It's a goddamned shame that this quiet little town, like most of the rest of the country will be a ghost town in some forty years after the events of 2025. It's hard to think about that right now though, when I'm being inundated with unfiltered nostalgia made manifest.

I actually started to cry when I drove by the bandstand where Andi and I would linger most Friday nights on our way to supper on our weekly date, (and where I ultimately broke up with her because I didn't want a long-distance relationship in University). We never did have long to linger there before getting to the Chinese food restaurant, mind you, as we had to make the most of our time together between the end of school and the start of my shift at _Duckies_. But it was usually long enough for me to sit her up on the railing or lean her up against one of the columns so that I could explore her mouth with my own.

I actually had to pull over completely when I saw the fountain where she and I had first met. Well, of course it wasn't the _first_ time we'd met mind you—everyone knew everyone in a town the size of Robertson, even though she'd just moved here a few months before—but it was the first time we really talked to each other without the distraction of other kids. We'd happen to run into each other one gorgeous Autumn day at the fountain and, well... we _fell_ into each other. I have no idea how it had happened, because I was normally just so, well... weird and withdrawn around girls. Normally, I clammed up and got all self-conscious, but Andi somehow got past all of that. Somehow, she shared some of her self-confidence with me, and we found out that we had a lot in common. I'd made a wish that day to be with Andi, and it had come true for two glorious years, until we went our separate ways after high school.

Funny how I was feeling nostalgic about this girl when I was, even now, in the process of living out my own history with her again. In my memory, Andi had grown into something of mythical proportions. She had been my first... well, she had been my first _everything_ : My first kiss, first love, first time, first breakup, and first regret all rolled into one. The young girl who was Andi in the past didn't seem like the same person, even though I knew that she was. She just seemed so,... damn, there was no other word for it but, _young_.

Maybe it was because I knew her potential. Maybe it was because I knew about the distinguished career that lay ahead for her in broadcasting, and that was somehow fusing with her incarnation in the past. In my mind, I still saw the face I would come to know on my TV screen, the face that was wearing an expression of deep concern that last time I saw it as she implored a scared population to remain calm in the face of a ruthless virus that was racing across the world like a wildfire.

After a few minutes of staring at the tumbling water in the fountain, I dried my eyes and pulled carefully out into traffic, heading in the direction of the big Canadian flag towards home. When I got there, Dad's truck was gone, and so was Patrick's motorcycle (I seemed to recall that he was away for the weekend at some kind of team-building retreat), and Mom was sitting in the kitchen waiting for me.

"Did you have lunch?" she asked as I tried to hide the greasy bag of fries behind me, which was made all the more difficult because this just made it easier for Chance to get at it. "There's some leftover lasagna in the fridge if you're hungry."

"Thanks Ma," I said, shooing the mischievous Golden Retriever away. "Have fun."

She was almost out the door when she turned back. "Are you OK on your own? Did you need me to drive you somewhere?" That was typical Mom. She was probably already late, but was still willing to delay further to make sure that I was properly fed or to drive me somewhere.

"Nah, it's all good," I said. "I've got my bike if I need to go anywhere."

When my mother was gone, and I finally had the place to myself, I brewed myself a pot of coffee and put a plate of Mom's lasagna in the microwave (with a healthy helping of freshly-shredded cheese piled on top). As the large machine hummed, I couldn't help but be reminded of my father's first reaction to a microwave oven. It had been at supper a friend's place when our hosts put a bag of buns in the microwave to warm them up. Perhaps predictably, my father had panicked, thinking that, because it was an oven, the plastic bag would melt. A month later, we had this unit, retrofitted into a hole that my father had made in the wall beside our conventional stove.

When the lasagna was warmed through, I filled a mug with some coffee, and headed out onto the back deck where I set up shop at the picnic table. Once I was seated and comfortable, Chance leapt up on the bench seat beside me to rest her head on my lap. I took my first sip of coffee as I stroked her fur affectionately and looked out over the fields in behind our house. It wasn't all that cold, but I shivered at the pleasure of it all nonetheless. Then, with a mouthful of lasagna, I opened my new journal and wrote my name on the inside cover, mostly to test the pen and to get the ink running. This done, I turned to the first page.

Looking back out across the meadows, my new pen poised to compose the first line of the journal, I paused, unsure where to begin with my story.

That's when it all became clear...

back to top

# Chapter 7

## Excerpt from Josh's journal

THE FUTURE AS I REMEMBER IT.

In my last journal entry, I wrote all about how I found myself in here the past. This one will be a tad confusing. It will be about what my future, but it will be something that's already happened to me, so from that perspective, it will be my past. Got it?

Good. Then let's begin...

WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW!

STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE FUTURE!!

*******

When I was growing up, the old folks used to tell me that they just didn't understand the world anymore, and that the only thing that made sense to them was the past. Now that I've lived through both the past and the future, I understand what they mean because, now that I'm back in my own past, I can't help but feel that the only thing that makes sense to me now is the future, the thing I've just come from, the time that hasn't happened yet.

Anything makes sense when you've had time to think about it afterwards. Nothing makes sense when it's happening, especially when it's happening to you for the second time and you don't know why.

It's been a full two and a half days in my own past, and it doesn't seem anywhere near close to ending. This is my reality now, as far as I can tell, but I'm no closer to understanding how, or even why, it's happened. Fitting in has certainly been challenging, if a little fun at times, and I keep going back and forth on whether I should even try. For now, I'm rationalizing that the world believes that I'm a seventeen-year old boy and that has certain limitations to it. If I push things too much, or tell people too much, I may end up getting put away, or worse, forcibly medicated.

Which is why I'm taking a really big chance with this journal I suppose, but it's a risk worth taking. I think.

Here, in a nutshell, are all the major events in my life B.P. (Before Pandemic):

After high school, I went to Western University for my undergrad, and then University of Toronto for grad studies, eventually getting my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Somewhere in the middle of that, I met and married Heather Hudson, and our son Matheson was born in 1995. We settled in Vaughn, Ontario eventually, with me working at Canada's Wonderland and her at a not-for-profit organization that offered free legal advice for battered women.

Life in the city wasn't really a good match for us though, and we moved north to Haliburton around 2000, where I worked from home for IBM and Heather set up her own law practice. Life was pretty good for us. Heather built quite a legal team, and I set up a helluva workshop on our property where I supplemented our income with the sale of various made-to-order electronic devices of my own design. Oh sure, there were the sad parts, like Dad dying in 2004, just a couple of years before Heather's father did, and Mom following about a decade later. But there were the happy parts too, like Matheson marrying his high school sweetheart, Suki, in 2020.

Heather and I had planned on retiring up North eventually, but Heather's health decided otherwise. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, she would be gone within a heart-breakingly short one-and-a-half-years. One small comfort was that she got to hold her newborn grand-daughter, Wilson, before she died.

My late wife's last request was that we take her ashes to her hometown of Summerside, Prince Edward Island, and toss them into the ocean that her ancestors had fished and where she herself had come of age, having been practically raised on a fishing boat. So, in the spring of 2025, I rented a huge RV, and set out for the Maritimes with Matheson, Suki, and Wilson for a long-overdue family vacation, during which we would say goodbye to Heather while we honoured her wishes.

Needless to say, something came up.

<I just stopped to get more coffee. Damn, it's good. I also played fetch with Chance for a bit to compose my thoughts. Now, where was I?>

Sometime in the not too distant future, Michael J. Fox, battling Parkinson's Disease for control of his own body, will famously say that it's rarely the worst-case scenario that you've been dreading that will get you, but something else entirely. I can't, of course, confirm the exact phrasing of this quote without access to the internet, or a time machine, but it's something like that, and it's an eerily accurate prediction of what's coming for all of us.

People today—or well, maybe not so much in 1985, but in a few decades—will come to believe that the biggest threat to humanity's future will be climate change, but it isn't. Well, I mean, yes it's still going to be a threat, but by 2025, it won't really matter that much anymore.

Anyhow, a few years before that, two political schools of thought will go head to head, one of which had been operating pretty much secretly even as it had been guiding public policy for at least two decades.

The first ideology was one that everyone was already familiar with. It was the group that had been saying for years that environmental degradation was a species-ending problem, but it wasn't too late to do something. Even though massive changes in worldwide weather patterns seemed to be too widespread to influence, they suggested that, if we poured all available resources into technologies and techniques, we could reverse the effects of climate change. They used public money to help those affected, and espoused green technology over the traditional, dirtier variety.

It was the other political ideology that finally made its genuine intentions clear, even though they had been pretty much obvious all along for those who were paying attention. This included big-oil companies like ExxonMobil who knew about the threat of climate change decades before it was publicly acknowledged, and actually hired think-tanks to release data that knowingly misled the public in order to foment skepticism.

Then there were the political parties that had always denied climate change. Well, the time finally came when they simply couldn't maintain that charade anymore, so they made a big deal publicly about suddenly caring, even as they enacting useless legislation that still somehow managed to channel the money towards the richest one percent.

Anyhow, what finally emerged into public knowledge was the fact that these far-right administrations had actually long believed that it was far too late to fix things. So, they had decided that it was better to plow full-steam ahead, exploit every resource, and secretly channel as much money as possible into building a worldwide network of massive underground complexes in which a small segment of the population (aka: the rich) could survive.

Once this fact was finally made public, people freaked out, but not in the way you might expect. Sure, some were outraged at the deception, but a larger portion (ironically, mostly the same ones who were duped into believing the conspiracy theories that the majority of the world's scientists were in cahoots) were clamouring to be included in these communities.

I'd love to tell you which side won, but I can't, because something more important happened first, something that nobody saw coming. It was an event that had decimated a full quarter of the Earth's population before anybody even had a chance to give it a proper name.

It happened so quickly that everything changed in about a minute. Those of us who survived did so mostly because of geography and dumb luck. For me and Matheson, Suki, and Wilson, it was because we just happened to be on Prince Edward Island spreading Heather's ashes when the first case of what came to be called the "Yellow Death" (named after the first symptom to manifest in a victim: yellow skin) was recognized in New Delhi. Then, two days later, when the 100,000th milestone death was reached, with the disease rocketing west across the Mediterranean into Europe and East across Asia before jumping across to British Columbia, that what remained of the Canadian government appeared on the island, surrounding it with about two-thirds of the Canadian Navy and most of its air force, declaring martial law. They closed down the Confederation bridge that joined PEI to the mainland, and ordered every civilian boat off the water and every aircraft out of the adjacent airspace.

Then, they took control of all the resources on the island. Every scrap of food, gas, and alcohol was locked up and rationed out to an increasingly jittery population. To their credit though, they found shelter for everyone who needed it, and vowed to do everything they could to keep us all safe.

For the next month, while the rest of the world died, the Navy patrolled the waters and the Air Force the skies all around the island both night and day. If any other vessel came anywhere near the shores, they were escorted far enough away until it was clear that they weren't infected and, if the occupants of the boat ignored these instructions and tried to make landfall anyhow, they were unceremoniously blown out of the water.

Dumb luck and geography. That was the only thing that saved my life and separated me from my friends and family, many of whom I would never see again until, unusually, some fifty years in the past. Mat was convinced that it was more than luck though. He swore that Mom had reached out from beyond the grave and saved our lives. I couldn't disagree. It was Heather who, more than a year earlier, had suggested the specific time frame for our visit. Just a few days either way, and it's hard to say if we would've survived.

Oskar had a different spin on it. He used to tell me that we owed our lives to the God of Irony because we were saved by the very fact that the disease was TOO deadly. If it had spread any slower than it had. If the incubation period was anything more than eight hours and the death rate was anything less than the 99% it was, then it would have spread everywhere in the world without exception: even PEI. Sick people would have gotten on flights without knowing that they were sick, and it would have gotten here—somehow. But then he put his typical conspiracy theory spin on the whole thing as he asked how a disease that killed in a matter of hours spread across the ocean from Asia to North America in the first place.

"Obviously," he stated matter-of-factly, "If the shortest flight between the two areas is about ten hours, then something else is goin' on."

As it was, many was the time I would stand on the wharf in Summerside, looking across the Northumberland Strait at the mainland, and pray that the winds weren't strong enough to carry an airborne disease across fifteen kilometers of open water.

Another ironic aspect of the whole sad tale was that, in the information age, information was exceedingly difficult to get a hold of. We were told it was a pig disease, much like swine influenza, but deadlier. A FUCK of a lot deadlier. Naturally, the moment this news broke, every pig on the island was destroyed and their remains, along with any and all packaged pork products, were loaded into large tanker ships and dumped into the ocean about a hundred miles offshore.

It was quite simply staggering how quickly everything broke down globally, I mean beyond the pandemic. We were told that something big had happened in Russia. Something that was rumoured to involve several nuclear explosions detonated by a few among the population unable to process the fear of Armageddon. Better to die in a huge explosion than by succumbing to a dirty pig flu, I suppose.

There were stories of greed and selfishness that made their way to us, naturally, but there were also stories of heroism and sacrifice. Like the one about the plane that had landed in New York City full of disease-stricken passengers and crew. This was still very early in the pandemic, and it still wasn't clear exactly what was going on, but the Captain seemed to know the stakes. He refused to open the airplane doors, either to let anybody get on to help, or get off and infect the city. Once he had enough gas, and with his own life failing, he lifted off again and crashed his death-plane into the ocean. It was pointless mind you. It gained the city an extra day or two, but the Captain couldn't have known that.

We didn't know everything that went on. Not really, because communication with the rest of world was gone by week three.

GONE. COMPLETELY.

A World Wide Web that had been designed to survive a nuclear attack, was completely out of our reach in less than a month. Of course, Oskar suspected that it had been sabotaged in some way, but I wouldn't hear that particular theory for a couple of years. For now, all that was left of the once great Internet were rumours that it was still out there somewhere, still operational in sequestered bunkers buried deep in the mid-west. But that didn't help us much. Our group of survivors were huddled desperately on an island in the Canadian Maritimes. We were still in shock, and, unable to go anywhere, we just stayed put, drank the Kool-Aid we were given, and thanked whatever God we worshipped that we were still alive enough to do even that.

It was perhaps a blessing that we lost all ability to communicate with our loved ones who were in the process of being mowed down by a ruthless virus on the mainland. I mean, how many times can you say goodbye, and apologize for being out of harm's way while you talk with somebody half a world away while you both wait for the inevitable to happen? It helped that both of my parents were already gone, and even though I never knew what happened to Patrick, it was a helluva lot worse for Suki. She was actually on the phone with her parents in Montreal when the lines went dead, and she spent months looking out over the Northumberland Strait as if hoping that they'd magically appear on the distant shore. And then, when the ships loaded with survivors started to arrive and were eventually allowed to dock, Suki and Mat were right there jostling with all of the other desperate families, pouring over the hand-written ship's manifest, looking in vain for familiar names.

I have to give a lot of credit to the Canadian government for how prepared it was and how well it managed the tragedy. They mobilized the population and got everyone working together to help one another. Existing food was efficiently distributed, and safeguards put in place so that those on the island who produced food (either through farming or fishing) could continue to do so as efficiently and as effectively as possible. Displaced people were eventually housed, first by filling any extra room on the island, and then through other means. Any building that could be used was appropriated, be it a shopping mall, a church, an arena, an old military base, or an empty warehouse. Even tourist buildings and museums were used to capacity, but still it wasn't enough. Not nearly. But we found a way. Perhaps it was the knowledge that there would be no international aid organization coming to our rescue that inspired us to get creative.

Once again, Mat, Suki, Wilson, and I were lucky. We had our rented RV to live in and, although we couldn't drive it out of the trailer park just outside Summerside since all of our gas had been commandeered, we could make space inside for three young people who had been celebrating their recent graduation with a bicycle trip across Canada. Perhaps it was the situation we were in, but it didn't take long for Donna, Vincent, and Celeste to become part of our family.

We all of us volunteered eagerly to pitch in to help the greater good. Mat worked on a local potato farm, Suki organized a local daycare, the kids distributed food on their bicycles, and I rigged the power grid that was feeding our park to operate more efficiently with the reduced flow of electricity that was now available. Then, when the underwater power feed from New Brunswick inevitably went dead, I located a turn-of-the-century hydroelectric power generating station near Freetown that had been turned into a museum, and spear-headed a team that managed to put the equipment that had been on display in the museum back into service. It wasn't much, but it allowed the electricity that was coming in from the thousands of wind turbines on the island to be directed to other areas of the tiny Province.

A third month passed with no real news that could be confirmed. Then, somehow, the virus made it across the Northumberland Strait killing most everyone in the West Cape area in a matter of days...

Well, I hate to dangle a cliff-hanger like this, but I hear a car in the driveway, and I really don't want to risk having to explain the fact that I'm suddenly keeping a journal to whomever it might be, so I will pick this up later.

SPOILER: I survive.

back to top

# Chapter 8

## The jagoff and the Jag

Holy crap!

Something happened tonight that has changed everything. I mean _everything_! I found a temporal anomaly—an anachronism, if you will—and the implications could be huge!

It had been business as usual earlier in the day when I had finished journaling, in that I had yet to notice any differences between this 1985 and the 1985 that I had previously lived through. It had been around 4 PM when I had heard a car pull up in front of my parent's house, so I had finished my entry and then taken my journal upstairs to lock it in my desk. When I had come back downstairs a few minutes later, it was to find that both my parents were now home, having both apparently arrived coincidentally around the same time. Dad was over by the liquor cabinet grousing about the women in Mom's "coffee club," while Mom was pulling containers out of our saffron-coloured fridge, ignoring him. Because there was food involved, Chance was standing right behind her hoping for something edible to hit the floor.

When she saw me, Mom cut across my father to ask, "Are you here for supper tonight, Josh?"

I thanked her and explained that I wasn't because I had plans with Andi. "Oh, I didn't even think," I added. "Can I use the car?" I still hadn't gotten used to having a vehicle, much less having to have to ask for permission to use it.

"You asked already," answered Mom. "Last weekend sometime, remember? I'm still not planning on going out tonight, and if I do have to go somewhere unexpectedly, I'll get your father to drive me."

My father, who was in the process of pouring himself a rye and ginger, grunted a response that could have been affirmative but I couldn't tell for sure. My ability to interpret my father's non-verbal patterns of communication was woefully antiquated.

While Mom threw together something to eat for her and Dad, I sat at the table sipping at some kind of green soda from "The Pop Shoppe" (even as I imagined Scotty's voice telling me what flavour it was by saying, "It's Green"), while chatting with my parents and eyeing my father's drink covetously. The rye whiskey that Oskar served in his bar in 2025 had been made on the island and was a far cry from the drink that I had learned to love as an adult when I would prepare it just like my father had: mixed with Canada Dry ginger ale. As I watched Dad sip at his glass, it occurred to me that I should have had one this afternoon when I was alone. Surely, Dad didn't pay attention to the levels in his bottles, right? I was pretty sure that Patrick had a stash in his room as well, but I risked getting more than just a stern lecture if I stole booze from my burly brother.

As Mom started to serve supper for her and Dad, I excused myself and went upstairs to shower and get dressed for my date. Luckily the question of how to pay for my meal had been answered by a wad of five twenties that I had found earlier in the secret money envelope that I kept in my _Coca-Cola_ nightstand. I seemed to recall that I had kept it there for emergencies, and, if shifting through time unexpectedly into the body of your younger self didn't qualify as an emergency, then it was beyond me what actually would.

I dressed in a pair of khakis with a short-sleeved, loose-fitting casual shirt with vertical stripes. Then, in adherence to 80s fashions, that I hoped I was remembering correctly, I flipped up the collar and fitted a loosely-knotted tie around my neck that was so thin that it might as well be emaciated. For footwear, I slipped on a pair of untied high tops. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I felt surprisingly comfortable and found myself smiling at the prospect of seeing Andi again so soon, even if I did have to endure an evening with her boorish friends to be with her.

When I got to Andi's a short while later, she was already outside and gesturing in such a way that made it clear that I shouldn't get too close to Brock's gleaming Jag, so I made sure to park on the street, a full hundred yards away. I'd no sooner got out of the car when Andi was on top of me, hugging me and kissing me.

"Thanks for last night," she said quietly in my ear. "And thanks for coming tonight. It means a lot to me. Phoebe and Brock are really looking forward to meeting you."

Andi had her long black hair pulled into a thick pony-tail, held in place by a ribbon tied to form a broad bow. She was dressed simply in a ruffled blouse with a skirt that would have been inappropriately short were she not wearing dark tights underneath it. The ensemble was capped off with leg-warmers that were the same green colour as the ribbon. It was, I had to agree, gloriously 80s.

As I hugged her, I could smell her favourite perfume that was, if memory served, called "White Linen." I was smiling in silly satisfaction at the whole experience, even as the young Greek woman broke out of the hug and started to pull me away from the car. Clearly, she was excited.

"Let's go, Josh! Phoebe and Brock are in the house!"

"Just a sec," I protested as I pulled the keys out of my pocket. "I have to lock the car." For a moment, Andi looked at me as I fumbled with the keys, instinctively—albeit briefly—trying to figure out where the lock button on the key fob was. Then, she reached over melodramatically, depressed the lock button on the actual car door and swung it shut.

I think she was muttering something about absent-minded professors when she grabbed my hand and pulled me up the driveway to the house's back door. Standing just inside that door were two of the yuppiest Yuppies I'd ever met. I mean, I could barely see past them and into the house because of the combined visual interference of their shoulder pads.

Once Andi had opened the door, Phoebe stepped forward, and the first thing I noticed about her, even as I heard Andi distantly introducing her, was her hair.

_Holy guacamole,_ I thought as I shook her hand mechanically. _Did girls really do that to their hair in the 80s? How in heaven's name is all that hair able to stay up that high? Did Doug Henning style it? I once saw him on the Muppet Show make a little worm dance in mid-air. That's the only possible explanation._

By the time I pulled my attention away from Phoebe's hair, I had enough time to briefly notice that she appeared to be wearing some kind of bridesmaid dress, before I became aware that Brock had been talking to me and had his arm extended expectantly.

I gripped his hand, remembering only as he was crushing my fingers, how he liked to overcompensate his firm handshakes, presumably to appear stronger and manlier. I ignored the discomfort as best I could, even as he jerked my hand around to pull me off balance, and told him that it was a pleasure meeting him and that it was a helluva nice car in the driveway.

"You dinn't park too close didja?" he asked almost predictably in his own particular version of the English language.

I assured him that I had given him plenty of room, before stepping back to take in his appearance. All in all, Brock appeared just as I'd remembered, dressed in a close approximation of one of the characters from _Miami Vice_ , with a white blazer over a salmon coloured T-shirt and a five-o'clock shadow that was several o'clocks too shadowy. He sported an intricately wound gold chain around his neck, and had obviously made sure that a copious amount of chest hair was peeking over the top of his collar.

Off in the distance, I could hear Andi's parents yell a greeting to me from the dining room along with a directive to have a good time tonight. The only indication that Phoebe's parents were visiting was the smell of cigar smoke coming down the hallway, something that was uncharacteristically out of place in Andi's house. I called back to thank them, and then was following the other three out the back door as if they were in some kind of a hurry to get away from the adults. Little did they know that, in reality, I was pretty much more akin to their parents, at least in terms of age.

It was as I was climbing into the back seat of the Jaguar that another memory finally came back to me of what had happened the first time that I'd lived through this experience.

"Buckle up," I whispered to Andi beside me, as I located my own seat belt. I had just managed to clip the ends together and grab the back of the seat ahead of me for balance, when Brock peeled out of the driveway and squealed his way down the street.

Thus, began one of the scariest ten minutes of my life, as this pampered beer dynasty heir turned the normally quiet streets of Robertson into his own personal drag strip, by ignoring stop signs and passing slow moving traffic in areas where such things were most definitely not allowed. If I hadn't already known that I'd survive, I'd have probably considered going after the Carotid artery pressure point on his neck the next time he slowed down in the hopes that it would weaken his legs enough for us to come to a full stop. Of course, this course of action was just as likely to actually cause an accident, so I ultimately decided that it was far better just to weather the experience again and hope for the best.

As Phoebe screamed at her fiancé to slow down and stop showing off, I looked over at Andi to find her eyes wide with fear. I knew for a fact that she didn't much care for roller coasters, so knew that this wild ride must be particularly difficult for her. I reached out and took her hand, and she squeezed it firmly while fixing me with a smile that was one part positive and two parts apologetic.

It was as Brock was squealing into the parking spot in front of _Golden Sun_ Chinese Food restaurant that I finally thought back to exactly how this approximation of _Mr. Toad's Wild Ride_ had previously affected the rest of the night. I hadn't known it at the time, but everything about Brock—from his handshake to the way he drove when he had passengers in his car—was all about dominance. He consistently threw people off balance to show that he was in charge, and then took advantage of the resulting shock to fully assert himself.

This, most certainly was exactly what had happened the first time that I'd lived through this experience. I had exited the car fuming at what Brock had done, but hadn't wanted a confrontation, so I had spent the rest of the night withdrawn and sulking. Andi hadn't enjoyed herself either, having been too focused on trying to get me to cheer up. Even Phoebe had been aware of the tension, and had directed her obvious displeasure toward her otherwise oblivious fiancé.

All of this had allowed Brock to control everything about the meal—from what we ordered, to what we drank, and even to what we talked about. In the end, he had gotten what he wanted: attention. It may not have been positive attention, mind you, but it was attention nonetheless.

This time though, I knew what was going on, and was mature enough to suppress my irritation at the young man so that I could avoid playing the game his way again. Indeed, it was a perfect opportunity to make use of the biting wit that I'd spent a lifetime sharpening. So, when Brock opened the Jag door to let me out, a puerile smirk on his face, I complimented him.

"Well that was exhilarating, Brock," I said as I stood up beside him so that we were both on the same level. "You handle the stick-shift pretty well." Brock's chest actually puffed up noticeably at the compliment but, before he could say anything in response, I continued, "Now, I'm not an expert, but, if I'm not very much mistaken, it sounded like your clutch was sizzling a little. Is it possible that you might have been accelerating a bit too much between shifts?"

Clearly, this wasn't what the fatuous young man was expecting from a passenger who should be both shaken and stirred, and not challenging his manhood by telling him that he couldn't drive stick. Behind me, I could hear Phoebe helping Andi out of the passenger side of the car and apologizing.

"If you rush the transition between gears," I continued, straightening my tie and adjusting my clothing. "You risk getting snagged in the lever's gate. I'd be happy to show you some techniques and best practices later if you'd like."

Brock was about to open his mouth to respond when Phoebe interrupted, summoning him in terse tones.

"Be right there, honey," he said quietly as he scowled at me uncertainly. "Thanks," he finally said to me curtly before turning abruptly to stalk towards his fiancé at the door of the restaurant. Along the way though, he stopped to quickly polish the tiny chrome cat on the car's hood with a handkerchief that he'd pulled seemingly from nowhere.

By the time I joined Andi, she was already inside the restaurant where Brock was loudly asking anyone who could hear what kind of backwoods restaurant didn't have a maître d'. Andi's face was flushed and, when I put my hand on the side of her neck in a show of support, I could feel her pulse.

Damn. How could I have forgotten the car ride? I should have suggested that Andi and I meet at the restaurant so I could have driven here myself, and avoided all of this drama.

"You OK?" I asked Andi. Behind us, Mr. Wonderful was rejecting the table we'd been offered and demanding one by the window instead, so that he could keep an eye on his Jag. Andi's eyes darted to Brock and then back at me. "Believe it or not," she said quietly. "He's an improvement over the last jackass that Phoebe was engaged to."

I laughed. "Wanna walk home?"

This made Andi smile but, instead of answering, she just stared up at me. "How are _you_?" she asked finally, almost as if she too knew how I had reacted to the erratic car ride the first time.

"Me? Oh, I'm fine. I just prefer my roller coaster rides to be in carefully controlled conditions. With lap restraints." Andi was still looking at me, as if expecting more, so I added, "Brock's an asshat, but I'm not going to let his social dominance games ruin my night."

Wait. Was 'asshat' a term that was used in 1985?

Phoebe was calling to us, bidding us to follow her now that Brock had found a table that met his exacting specifications. Before heading off in Phoebe's direction though, Andi leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. "When did you get to be so mature, Mister? It turns me on."

As I followed her, I scanned the restaurant to look at the other customers. There were only a few occupied tables, all of them staring at us because of Brock's antics, but I didn't see any faces I recognized, thank goodness.

Brock was already seated at the table, scanning the menu. I held Andi's seat for her as Phoebe scowled at him for not doing the same for her, before eventually settling heavily onto the seat beside him. I knew that Brock was about to announce what he thought we should all eat so, before he could say anything, I spoke up, "Hey Andi, what's that specialty of the house that you liked so much the last time that we were here?" I was taking a chance, because I obviously had no idea when we'd last been here. I just knew that she had had a favourite item on the menu, but I just couldn't recall what it had been. The gamble paid off though.

"General Tso's chicken," answered Andi. "They make it regular or extra spicy."

"Oh, that sounds nice," added Phoebe, either unaware that Brock was about to speak or indifferent to it.

As Phoebe was still talking, I made a show of opening the menu to look like I was confirming something. "If memory serves," I lied, since I already knew from my visit here earlier today what I was about to suggest. "That dish is part of the _Dinner for Five_ combination meal that the restaurant offers... Why, yes it is, there it is right there." I held my menu up so that the girls could see where I was indicating, but Brock could not. Conveniently, I was angling the document so that it was physically blocking Brock's line of sight, taking him out of the conversation and effectively leaving him out of the decision-making process.

When I eventually put the menu down, Brock was scowling at me again, as if suspecting me of usurping his unspoken authority. Last time, he had ordered a-la-carte and chosen a variety that hadn't been particularly inspiring, if even palatable. I don't think that even he had enjoyed the combination of tastes, especially with the special requests he had asked for, but it gave him a perverse pleasure knowing that we were being forced to abide by his choices no matter how much we had disliked it. But, now that Phoebe had expressed a desire to order what I was suggesting in lieu of what Brock wanted to decree, he was clearly taking it personally.

This meal hadn't been nearly this enjoyable the first time.

It got even more gratifying when it was Mr. Lin, the owner himself, that came to take our order instead of one of his wait staff. Apparently, my father had done a renovation on Mr. Lin's house last November, and the restaurant owner wanted to tell me how happy he was with it. As we chatted, I could tell that Brock was clearly itching to be the one to place our order, but I beat him to the punch in the course of my conversation with Mr. Lin. Then, once I had told the restauranteur what the four of us were celebrating, Mr. Lin even promised to send out a few extras on the house in honour of the young couple's engagement, including a round of his celebrated Won Ton soups. He would have offered champagne, he had said, but he knew that we were all too young, so it was the next best thing.

As the man spoke, I looked at him in rapt wonder. This whole interaction hadn't happened before, presumably, since I'd been in such a bad mood at the time and had clearly been sending off irate vibes. If I ever saw Oskar again, I'd be sure to tell him that his philosophy of life was definitely correct, now that I'd been able to see different results from the same situation when the only difference between the two was a positive change in attitude on my part.

After Mr. Lin had left us, Andi asked to see the engagement ring again, and Phoebe was all too happy to oblige, holding out her hand proudly so that Andi could get a better look. The rock on her finger was just as big as I had remembered, and just as spectacular—if you were into ostentatious displays of wealth, that was.

"Congratulations you two," I offered genially, lifting my glass of ice water by way of a toast. "You are about to embark on a truly amazing journey, being part of a team. It is truly a wonderful thing when we find a person that can both lift us up and make us feel grounded all at the same time. When we find somebody who not only sparks joy within us, but can light us up simply by smiling in our direction." Andi pulled her gaze away from the ring to look at me disbelievingly, as if this wasn't the kind of thing that I normally did or said. My eyes found hers as I continued speaking, "That kind of person is a rare thing. It's the kind of person that is worth falling backwards through time to find." Looking back at the couple across from me, I finished, "I wish the both of you continued health and happiness. May your joy be boundless, and may your life together be full of awe, and not the other way around."

If Andi was at all skeptical about my sentiment, Brock and Phoebe were eating up my attention and asking for seconds. We all clinked glasses. "That is an amazing rock, though," I added. "Don't hold it up to the light, you're likely to start a fire! Shouldn't you at least have a security officer following you around everywhere?"

"Who says dere ain't one around?" Brock offered lightly, glancing in pretend clandestineness over his shoulder.

I looked at him in shock for a moment. Had Brock just said something that I had found amusing?

_Well, I'll be damned; miracles_ can _happen._

We were all laughing good-naturedly at Brock's joke as the waiter delivered our drinks. This was actually another surprise in that, even though Brock was old enough to order alcohol, he was refraining from doing so out of respect for his three underage dinner companions. This too was something that differed from what had happened the first time, when he had forced us all to watch him drink a glass of expensive wine. We toasted again with pop instead of water, which was only slightly less lame.

This course of action appeared to be exactly what was needed to break the tension. As much as I would have liked to continue to yank Brock's chain, I also knew that this would upset Andi, and I really wanted her to have a good time. In fact, I wanted to enjoy myself too. I was still new to going out for a meal for fun, having been in basic survival mode for the last ten years of my life. Simply going out on an actual town that wasn't floating was a genuine thrill and, if the company wasn't one that I necessarily would have chosen, I was at least mature enough now to find ways to make it bearable.

This attitude carried me through most of the meal, even though I eventually found my focus slipping by the time that our complimentary desserts were being served, and just as Brock started to tell us all that he'd heard that the Phil Collins song _In the Air Tonight_ was based on a true story.

"Yeah," Brock was saying. "So, like, Phil Collins was watchin' as this guy didn't do nothin'..."

That's about as far as I got in paying attention to Brock. I tuned him out in part because I'd finally had enough of his hideous mangling of the English language, but mostly because I already knew the story. From my perspective, it was extremely old news. The widely spread rumour in the early 80s was that Phil Collins had watched helplessly as somebody drowned when the one man who could have actually saved the guy had refused to help. The rumour further claimed that Phil invited this selfish man to one of his concerts, gave him a front row seat, and shone a spotlight on him as he sang the following lyrics from his new song directly at him:

Well if you told me you were drowning,  
I would not lend a hand.

I've seen your face before my friend,  
but I don't know if you know who I am.

Well I was there and I saw what you did,  
I saw it with my own two eyes.

So, you can wipe off that grin,  
I know where you've been,

It's all been a pack of lies.

The lyrics of the song were most definitely accusatory, and the wide-spread rumour went that right after the concert, knowing that whole world now knew about his cowardice, the man had gone home and killed himself.

As Brock chewed through his narrative with his unfortunate choice of vocabulary and diction, I sighed inwardly and looked wistfully out the window. Naturally, I'd heard the story before. _Many_ times before, and knew from the perspective of fifty years that it was bullshit. Still, it made me wonder about how stories like this actually travelled in the days before the internet. In my youth, it had always amazed me how remote towns like Robertson were still up to date in so many things—current jokes, gossip, trends etc, yet information like the Phil Collins rumour didn't exactly spread by newspaper, TV, or radio. I grinned inwardly as I realized that I was sitting there looking at the answer to at least one of my questions, at least insofar as it concerned _In the Air Tonight._ This particular piece of gossip was being carried from the city of Toronto to a small town in Northern Ontario by a mouthy heir to a beer dynasty. Perhaps Brock was what Malcolm Gladwell would, years from now, call a "Maven."

But what about other such unsubstantiated stories? How had they travelled? I could vaguely recall that around this same time, my friends and I would be sharing the news that Cyndi Lauper's song _She Bop_ was all about female masturbation, or that Ray Parker Jr. had stolen the tune for the _Ghostbusters_ theme from Huey Lewis' _I Want A New Drug_ (This last one especially funny because, in high school, I couldn't really see how the two songs were at all similar yet, years later, my eight-year-old son, Mat, upon hearing _I Want A New Drug_ on an 80s flashback radio show, had told me that "it sounded an awful lot like that song from the movie with all the ghosts").

Then there were rumours that there were spider eggs in _Bubble Yum_ chewing gum, or that Little Mikey's head exploded when he drank Coke with a mouth full of PopRocks, or that Richard Gere had gotten a little too "friendly" with a gerbil, or that Jamie Lee Curtis was really a man, or that Alice Cooper had bitten the head off a live chicken, or that Ozzy Osbourne had done the same thing to a live bat.

There were so many examples to list, all of them with no way for the kids of the 80s to prove or disprove them. This was the real fake news, years before Trump made the term a divisive political talking point, and without Web sites like snopes.com to settle the disputes.

Yet even access to the truth didn't always help, not in extreme cases of cognitive dissonance, where people with strongly held beliefs rejected ample evidence that contradicted those beliefs—even very obvious and irrefutable evidence. I'd often wondered if this was the root cause of the anxiety epidemic that gripped the majority of the population in the mid to late 2010s. In that era, people had started to get progressively more anxious, seemingly in direct relation to the amount of access that they had to the truth. For many, it wasn't so much that more information meant that there was more to be worried about, it meant that more information made it harder for them to justify holding onto their incorrect dogmas. Those who wanted to continue to fool themselves, got more and more anxious as it became harder to remain ignorant, and those who weren't fooling themselves got anxious when looking at the people who were.

I can recall being very frustrated at the trend of people like the anti-vaxxers or the climate change deniers who refused to accept any scientific evidence contrary to their politics, choosing instead to trust the conspiracy theory that it was all some kind of plot to deceive them. It was obvious that those who remained ignorant in the information age did so intentionally. Ironically, it got much easier for these people once the _Ensee_ got control of information on the island and began subtly amending it to their own end. If alternative facts helped to reduce the anxiety level of a person like that, then it was simply amazing how quickly this person's memory shortened to accommodate it.

But then again, even before 2025, back when there actually was a full-fledged internet, it still wasn't always easy to establish a rumour's credibility. It certainly didn't help confirm that wild tale about Magnus Levenko, that the reason that he disappeared in the early 2000s was because he warned the American government about 9/11 before it happened, and was arrested shortly thereafter under suspicion of collusion.

Come to think of it, I haven't heard of Magnus at all since I shifted. As the wunderkind of the 80s, shouldn't he be all over the news? What was it he was up to in 1985?

In the background, Brock was still talking, and I tuned in suddenly to what he had just said because it was wrong—but not because it was fake news.

"...that's why da song says 'If you told me you was choking,'" he had just said. "It's, like... a reverence to de incident."

"I'm sorry," I interrupted, deciding not to tell him that he meant to say 'reference', asking instead, "The song says what?"

"If you told me you was choking," he repeated. So, I hadn't actually misheard him. "You heard da song ain't you Josh? It's on _Miami Vice_ like every udder week."

"Drowning," I corrected him, thinking that he was screwing up the words of the song just as badly as he was transgressing against the English language. "If you told me you were _drowning_..." At this point, I stopped because it wasn't just Brock who was wearing an odd expression. All three of my dinner companions were looking at me now like I was crazy.

It was Andi who spoke next. "Josh," she began like she was talking to a toddler. "It's 'choking.' As in: 'If you told me you were _choking_...'"

What the bloody hell?

I froze for a moment as everyone scrutinized me. I knew, somehow instinctively, that there was something different, something significant going on. I immediately gave up even trying to argue the point, and instead chose to attempt a distraction. Looking out the window towards Brock's Jag, I told him that I thought I had just seen a bird defecate on it.

You would have thought a bomb had gone off. Brock stood up dramatically and ran out the door screaming bloody murder with Phoebe following right after him, calling out his name as if he had been heading off to war and had neglected to say good bye. Andi though, was different. She sat there looking at me, eyes slightly squinted, as if seeing me for the first time. I tried to ignore her by taking a drink of my pop as I narrated what Brock was doing outside the window of the Chinese restaurant.

"Oh look. He's actually got a special squeegee for bird droppings," I said. "I didn't know they made those. ... Wait. Is it gold? Brock's got a solid-gold squeegee, Andi!... OK, now he's inspecting the car, and furiously scrubbing off anything that slightly resembles bird guano.... Now he's looking up into the sky to see if maybe the guilty party is somewhere close by. I could be wrong, but I think that bird is long gone, but I'd be happy to volunteer to round up a few of the usual suspects if he wants."

Across from me, Andi's suspicious expression was slowly giving way to amusement thanks to the sports-broadcaster voice I was using to deliver my irreverent comments.

"...and now we can see that Brock's just pulled out a spray can and a cloth," I continued. "And he is now wiping down the car at random.... Oh look, a crowd is gathering. It might just be this broadcaster's opinion, but Phoebe doesn't look at all happy, probably because Brock is taking questions.... Oh wait, now he's chasing a small child away from the ornament thingee on the hood. What's that thing called again?"

"A hood ornament," answered Andi dryly, blinking languidly.

"Yeah. That's the ticket," I said in a John Lovitz impression that was obviously completely lost on my 1985 girlfriend. "Too soon?" I asked. It probably was. Guess I'd better not expect _Wayne's World_ quotes to get recognized in this time period either.

"You're pretty pleased with yourself, aren't you?" Andi said dryly.

"I sure am... NOT." I replied cheekily. Andi looked back at me blankly.

_Yep. Definitely too soon for_ Wayne's World.

By this point, Phoebe had finally dragged Brock back into the restaurant and back to his seat, but he was still restless and staring out the window even more than before.

"Thanks Josh," Brock said gratefully, his tough-guy attitude momentarily blunted for some reason. "Northern Ontario bird crap ain't de same as the crap in da South. It's more acidic. I was afraid of dis, it's why I axed to park da Jag underground but didn't know that this backwater ain't got no underground. I tole you I shoulda put da fabric cover on her, Phoebe."

As the two of them bickered, Andi rolled her eyes and jumped in to change the subject and direct it somewhere else entirely. She was really good that way. I was just happy that my mistake with the Phil Collins lyrics had been apparently forgotten. But _I_ wasn't about to forget it though.

The rest of the night was a bit of a blur. I tried to stay present for Andi, but my mind was racing.

Why were the lyrics of that song different from what I remember them to be?

Admittedly, I hadn't really been listening to the music of the era very closely over the last three days. It was mostly because, unlike everyone else in 1985, I'd heard these same songs over and over again for the last five decades. To me, they'd become background music.

Now that I realized that there was at least one difference between this 1985 and the one that I had lived through, I was naturally wondering if there were others that I just hadn't noticed. So, through the rest of the evening, as we walked the downtown streets, and went to the local theater to see Madonna's first film _Desperately Seeking Susan_ , I was looking everywhere for other temporal anomalies.

I didn't find any. Well, not at first, anyhow.

It was much later, when I had said goodbye to Andi and the others and was driving home, that I found my second altered lyric when I was listening to REO Speedwagon's _Can't Fight this Feeling_ on the car radio. Although it had been the first song that I'd heard upon waking up in my own past just a few days earlier, I had understandably been a little preoccupied with being a teenager again to notice that it wasn't exactly the same as before.

Instead of singing "...and throw away the _oars_ forever", like I remembered, the lead singer was now singing "...and throw away the _sails_ forever."

Once I heard it, I began to tremble physically. Then, when the chorus repeated, and I heard it a second time, I actually teared up a little.

Am I losing it?

This was, in and of itself, worrisome since I'd had a tenuous grasp of late on whatever "it" was in the first place.

The first thing I had to confirm in my mind was whether this was an actual change, or whether I was simply misremembering it. Sure, the song was still new to this particular time period, but I was about to hear it over and over in the next few months as Andi would soon fall head over heels in love with it, and insist on playing it repeatedly during our fervent make out sessions. If that wasn't enough though, I would be forced to listen to it ad nauseum on oldies radio in the future where it would be repeated at least twice a day even forty or fifty years from now as well as in the playlist that Oskar insisted on playing in his bar, back on the _Pucks_.

No, I concluded. This wasn't a trick of my memory. I clearly remembered the old lyrics, having often wondered over the years, whenever I'd heard the song, about what kind of ship would use oars. Was it a Viking longboat? A slave galley?

I'm not mistaken, I'm sure of it.

Once I was confident in this assessment, I turned my mind to the other important question: Why are there differences? Sure, it was possible that time didn't necessarily have to flow the same way twice, but why would that manifest itself, as far as I could tell, simply in the alteration of a few song lyrics? Nothing else in this time period seemed out of place. The political leaders were all the same. Movies, songs, celebrities, people of prominence, headlines: they were all in keeping with what I remembered. It's not like I'd noticed any songs I'd never heard before, or movies I'd never seen, or people I'd never heard of. If this timeline was proceeding differently, then it should be obviously different, right? Not just in a, seemingly random, altered lyric.

When I got home, my parents had gone to bed but I didn't have any illusions that I'd be able to do the same thing myself. I went up to my room, pulled out the box that housed my collection of cassettes and started feeding them into my tape player one at a time. It was a task that would take hours, but I wasn't in any condition to sleep. While the music on the cassette tapes was playing as quietly as I could keep it while still reasonably being able to hear it, and, even as I listened carefully to the lyrics, I poured over anything in my room that might be obviously different from what I remembered it to be. This included my comic and magazine collection, my books, as well as my trading cards.

By three AM, I'd gone through ever piece of music I had at my disposal (most of my music was movie soundtracks which were still mostly orchestral in the 1980s, so I didn't really own that much in the way of 'Pop' music) and had even raided Patrick's cassettes. In about three and a half hours, I'd identified three more anomalies, all of them in the form of changed song lyrics. To help keep track, I'd used a ruler to draw a table on the last page of my new journal (man, I missed computer spreadsheets), and filled in the first few rows as follows:

For the longest time, I sat staring at the table in front of me, a glass of rye whiskey gripped rather unsteadily in my trembling hand. About an hour ago, I had finally decided that I couldn't handle this change in the status quo sober, so had snuck quietly down to my father's liquor cabinet and helped myself, a clandestine activity that would have gone a lot smoother had Chance not thought that I'd come downstairs to play with her.

So, clearly, I wasn't imagining these changes. This was really happening. I had now identified five examples of things that were out of place in this time period. Five anomalies, or, more appropriately, since they were aspects (like myself) that didn't belong in this time period, five _anachronisms_.

Well, as Oskar liked to say: Fuck me, Jack Benny.

My geeky friends and I had always taken great pleasure in looking for anachronisms in movies that had been set in the past. These would be things that just didn't belong in the time period in which the movie had been set, such as the guitar that Marty McFly plays in _Back to the Future_ which hadn't actually been released until three years after the year that he'd travelled back to, or the Canadian flag with the maple leaf that was shown in the _Untouchables_ that wouldn't be created until some thirty years after the events depicted, or the _Apple_ stocks that Forrest Gump bought in 1975 even though the company wouldn't go public until 1980.

Looking for such anachronisms in movies was one thing, but looking for them in real life? This was beyond weird. I took another sip of my drink, careful to go easy on a young throat that wasn't at all used to the kind of burn that went hand in hand with whiskey.

One anachronism might be explained away as pure chance, but _five?_ And these were just the ones that I'd found so far. How many more were there? Was there a relevance to the fact that these are fairly minor changes to the popular culture of the day that would only really be obvious to somebody who had already lived through the era?

_Holy awesome fuck,_ I thought as this fact sunk in. _I'm the only one who would know that they're different! I'm the only one who knows what they used to be._

But why?

Even I was getting tired of hearing myself ask this question.

In an attempt to look at things differently, I pulled out a separate piece of paper and wrote down just the new words by themselves.

CHOKING

SAILS

FOLLOW

TO

GET

_Well sure. Everything is much clearer now isn't it?_ I thought as I examined the words that looked almost like a message.

That's when it hit me.

What if they weren't just random words? Words formed sentences, right? And sentences formed messages. What if these words were actually some kind of a message?

Quickly, I pulled my pair of scissors out of the drawer of my desk and cut each of the words out so that I could try different combinations. It was only after another twenty minutes of fruitlessly trying to glean some kind of meaning from the various combinations of words, when another, perhaps even more important thought, struck me.

Maybe, I'm not alone!

What if somebody else came back too? What if they were making these changes to send a message to others, like myself, who had also been displaced?

There was a super simple way to test this theory: I was going to have to look for more. I was going to have to find them all.

back to top

The story CONTINUES in:

The ANACHRONISTIC CODE

BOOK TWO: the COMEBACK KID

It's 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen... again. And he's not alone.

Somebody has made changes to the era that Josh grew up in, and he's trying to figure out if it's a message without letting anyone know that the future isn't pretty. Will the message help him change that future? If so, then Josh must decode it, not just for himself and the girl he left behind, but for the future of humanity.

Available now!

#  About the AUTHOR

Watercolour artist and author **Dwayne R. James** lives in Peterborough, Ontario where he writes and paints as often as he can, that is when he's not spending time with his daughter, twin sons, and his very forgiving wife.

Dwayne has a Master's Degree in archaeology, something he claims is definitive proof that he knows how to write creatively. "Indeed, the most important skill I learned in university," he posits, "was the ability to pretentiously write about myself in the third person."

After spending close to a decade as a technical writer at a large multi-national computer company, Dwayne opted to look at their Jan 2009 decision to downsize him as an opportunity to become a stay@home Dad for his newborn twins, and pursue his painting and writing whenever the boys allowed him to do so.

It is a decision that continues to make him giggle with wild abandon to this very day.

Visit Dwayne online:

His personal Web page:

www.dwaynerjames.com

His virtual art studio and store:

www.resteddy.com.

His Facebook page:

<http://www.facebook.com/dwaynerjames>

His Smashwords page:

<https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/dwaynerjames>

#  Also by Dwayne R. James

##  Gingers&Wry

## The collected observations of a stay@home Dad  
with three red-headed children.

### Short Description

When I was laid off in January of 2009, it turned out to be one of the best things to ever happen to me, even though it was immediately followed by the news that my wife was expecting twin boys. This book is all about the hilarious misadventures that followed in the next four years, as I learned to balance my new life as a stay@home Dad with my lifelong dream of pursuing a creatively driven life.

### Long Description

_Gingers & Wry_ is frequently hilarious, occasionally poignant, and consistently honest—sometimes, brutally so.

The book is a collection of quips and comments, originally posted online, threaded together by a narrative that describes four years in the author's life as he moves from being laid off, and into his new role as a stay@home Dad for twin boys.

It humorously documents the challenges and rewards of raising two tenacious toddlers and an opinionated teenaged daughter, all of them redheads.

back to top

## amuzings

### Short Description

### In this collection of over 1,100 pithy quips, puns, one-liners and zingers, humorist Dwayne James records observations on the wonders and the absurdities of his daily life over the last six years. You'll laugh as you read about the author's efforts to balance a creatively-driven career with the demands of his busy domestic life, puzzle at his clever wordplay, and giggle at his phrase turning.

### Long Description

If you're new to the story, let me catch you up on the journey already in progress...

I'm Dwayne. Currently, I'm an artist and writer, but it wasn't always that way. For many years, I was a single-father for a precocious young girl while I worked from home for a large computer company. Then, things changed. Literally overnight.

I met an amazing woman and fell head over toes in love. In a matter of a year, we were married and expecting twins, but it's the precise manner in which it happened that continues to boggle the mind. As the story goes (and I am NOT making this up), my wife and I found out that she was pregnant with twins the day after I was laid off from the aforementioned good paying job in January of 2009.

The months and years that followed were equal parts challenging and rewarding as I balanced my new role as a stay at home Dad with the excitement of establishing myself as a fledgling artist and all-around creative type. During this dramatic period of my life, one of the things that helped keep me sane was my ability to provide a running commentary on Social Media about the insanity of it all. In 2012, I gathered up all of the posts that I'd made to that point, composed a narrative to link it all together, and self-published it as a book called _Gingers & Wry._

In the months and years since _G &W_ came out, my ginger kids have grown quite a bit. The twins have gone to grade school, my daughter has gone to University, and all three continue to delight and amaze me. As for my wife and me, she's well respected at her job, and I've carved out a comfortable niche in the local arts community.

Through it all, I've continued to post irreverent commentary about life's wonders and absurdities on Social Media. I'd been toying with the idea of gathering them all together again like I'd done for _G &W_ when a chance encounter with two different friends in the same week, both who told me how much they enjoyed my irreverent comments, and both who said they would make a funny book, gave me the impetus I needed. I immediately sat down and began to put this publication together.

This collection differs from _G &W_ in that it doesn't have the running narrative. It focuses primarily on roughly six years' worth of the quips, puns, one-liners, and zingers that I've come to call _amuzings_.

As an added bonus, I've also included two short-stories that I composed originally for two separate iterations of the _CBC Non-Fiction story contest_. Although neither one was recognized in their respective contests, "Lies I Told My Father" was later noticed by a producer on Stuart Mclean's Vinyl Café Radio program. She had wanted to include it on a future show as a part of the "Stories from Listeners" segment, but it never happened due to Stuart's untimely death in 2017 (Um. Just to be clear. I did not mean to make it sound like I'm complaining that another person's death was inconvenient for me. That's clear, right?)

I'm not convinced that there's a good way to read the content of this book. It's not necessarily designed to be read from start to finish. I've broken it up into sections and sub-sections with the idea that you can flip to any part of the book and read a few pages and walk away amused as well as satisfied that you can do the same thing all over again later. With over 1,100 amuzings and stories to choose from, I'm confident that you'll be hard pressed to repeat yourself anytime soon!

Happy reading!

back to top

