The Time Traveler's Almanac (52 page)

She was right. Justin had long since stopped worrying about whether he was cool. You could stay at the edge till you were thirty – thirty-five if you really pushed it. After that, you were either a fogy or a grotesque. He’d taken fogydom for granted for years. Now he had to ride the crest of the wave again. He wondered if it was worth it.

Helen started spinning more singles. Justin danced till one. At least he had the next day off. Even so, he wished he were home in bed – not with Megan but alone, blissfully unconscious. No such luck. Somebody with enough rings in his ears to set off airport metal detectors passed out xeroxed directions to the rave. That told Justin where it was. He didn’t want to go, but Megan did. “You wearing out on me?” she asked. They went.

He wondered who owned the warehouse – a big Lego block of a building – and if whoever it was had any idea what was going on inside. He doubted it. It was a dreadful place for a big party – concrete floor, wires and metal scaffolding overhead, acoustics worse than lousy. But Megan’s eyes glowed. The thrill of the not quite legal. The cops might show up and throw everybody out.

He knew they wouldn’t, not tonight, because they hadn’t. And, at forty, the thrill of the not quite legal had worn off for him. Some smiling soul came by with little plastic bottles full of greenish liquid. “Instant Love!” he said. “Five bucks a pop.”

Megan grabbed two. Justin knew he had to grab his wallet. “What’s in it?” he asked warily.

“Try it. You’ll like it,” the guy said. “A hundred percent natural.”

Megan had already gulped hers down. She waited expectantly for Justin. He remembered taking a lot of strange things at raves, but that had been a long time ago – except it wasn’t. Nothing had killed him, so he didn’t suppose this would.

And it didn’t, but not from lack of trying. The taste was nasty plus sugar. The effect … when the shit kicked in, Justin stopped wishing for coffee. He felt as if he’d just had seventeen cups of the strongest joe ever perked. His heart pounded four hundred beats a minute. His hands shook. He could feel the veins on his eyeballs sticking out every time he blinked.

“Isn’t it
great?
” Megan’s eyes were bugging out of her head.

“Whatever.” When Justin was twenty-one, he’d thought this kind of rush was great, too. Now he wondered if he’d have a coronary on the spot. He did dance a lot more energetically.

And, when he took Megan back to his place, he managed something else, too. With his heart thudding the way it was, remembering anything related to foreplay wasn’t easy, but he did. Had he been twenty-one, it surely would have been wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Megan seemed suitably appreciative; maybe that Instant Love handle wasn’t altogether hype.

But his real age told. Despite the drug, whatever it was, and despite the company, he couldn’t have gone a second round if he’d had a crane to get it up. If that bothered Megan, she didn’t let on.

Despite his failure, he didn’t roll over and go to sleep, the way he had the first night. He wondered if he’d sleep for the next week. It was past four in the morning. “Shall I take you home?” he asked. “Your folks gonna be worried?”

Megan sat up naked on the bed and shook her head. Everything moved when she did that; it was marvelous to watch. “No problem,” she said. “They aren’t on me twenty-four-seven like some parents. You don’t want to throw me out, I’d just as soon stay a while.” She opened her eyes very wide to show she wasn’t sleepy, either.

“Okay. Better than okay.” Justin reached out and brushed the tip of her left breast with the backs of his fingers. “I like having you around, you know?” She had no idea how much he wanted to have her around. With luck, she’d never find out.

“I like being around.” She cocked her head to one side. “You’ve been kind of funny the last couple days, you know?”

To cover his unease – hell, his fear – Justin made a stupid face. “Is that funny enough for you?” he asked.

“Not funny like that,” Megan said. He made a different, even more stupid, face. It got a giggle from her, but she persisted: “Not funny like that, I told you. Funny a different sort of way.”

“Like how?” he asked, though he knew.

Megan didn’t, but groped toward it: “Lots of little things. The way you touch me, for instance. You didn’t used to touch me like that.” She looked down at the wet spot on the sheets. “I like what you’re doing, believe me I do, but it’s not what you were doing last week. How did you … find this out, just all of a sudden? It’s great, like I say, but…” She shrugged. “I shouldn’t complain. I’m
not
complaining. But…” Her voice trailed off again.

If I’d known then what I know now
– everybody sang that song. But he didn’t just sing it. He’d done something about it. This was the thanks he got? At least she hadn’t come right out and asked him if he had another girlfriend.

He tried to make light of it: “Here I spent all night laying awake, trying to think of things you’d like, and—”

“I do,” Megan said quickly. She wasn’t lying, not unless she was the best actress in the world. But she went on, “You looked bored in the Probe tonight. You never looked bored in a club before.”

Damn.
He hadn’t known it showed. What was hot at twenty-one wasn’t at forty.
Been there, done that.
That was what people said in the ’90s. One more thing he couldn’t admit. “Tired,” he said again.

Megan nailed him for it. “You never said that, either, not till yesterday – day before yesterday now.” Remorselessly precise.

“Sorry,” Justin answered. “I’m just me. Who else would I be?” Again, he was conscious of knowing what she didn’t and keeping it from her. It felt unkosher, as if he were the only one in class who took a test with the book open. But what else could he do?

Megan started getting into her clothes. “Maybe you’d better take me home.” But then, as if she thought that too harsh, she added some teasing: “I don’t want to eat what you’d fix for breakfast.”

He could have made her a damn fine breakfast. He started to say so. But his younger self couldn’t have, not to save his life. He shut up and got dressed, too. Showing her more differences was the last thing he wanted.

Dawn was turning the eastern sky gray and pink when he pulled up in front of her parents’ house. Before she could take off her seat belt, he put his arm around her and said, “I love you, you know?”

His younger self wouldn’t say those words for another year.
Taking my time,
the socially backwards dummy called it. For Justin at forty, the words weren’t just a truth, but a truth that defined his life – for better and, later on, for worse. He had no trouble bringing them out.

Megan stared at him. Maybe she hadn’t expected him to say that for quite a while yet. After a heartbeat, she nodded. She leaned over and kissed him, half on the cheek, half on the mouth. Then she got out and walked to her folks’ front door. She turned and waved. Justin waved back. He drove off while she was working the deadbolt.

*   *   *

He finally fell asleep about noon. The Instant Love kept him up and bouncing till then. At two-thirty, the phone rang. By the way he jerked and thrashed, a bomb might have gone off by his head. He grabbed the handset, feeling like death. “Hello?” he croaked.

“Hi. How are things?”

Not Megan. A man’s voice. For a second, all that meant was that it didn’t matter, that he could hang up on it. Then he recognized it: the voice on his own answering machine. But it wasn’t a recording. It was live, which seemed more than he could say right now. His younger self.

He had to talk, dammit. “Things are fine,” he said. “Or they were till you called. I was asleep.”

“
Now?
” The way himself-at-twenty-one sounded, it might have been some horrible perversion. “I called now ’cause I figured you wouldn’t be.”

“Never mind,” Justin said. The cobwebs receded. He knew they’d be back pretty soon. “Yeah, things are okay. We went to the Probe last night, and—”

“
Did
you?” His younger self sounded – no,
suspicious
wasn’t right.
Jealous.
That was it. “What else did you do?”

“That after-hours place. Some guy came through with fliers, so I knew how to get there.”

“Lucky you. And what
else
did you do?” Yeah. Jealous. A-number-one jealous.

Justin wondered how big a problem that would be. “About what you’d expect,” he answered tightly. “I’m you, remember. What would you have done?”

The sigh on the other end of the line said his younger self knew exactly what he would have done, and wished he’d been doing it.
But I did it better, you little geek.

Before his younger self could do anything but sigh, Justin added, “And when I took her home, I told her I loved her.”

“Jesus!” himself-at-twenty-one exclaimed. “What did you go and do that for?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“That doesn’t mean you’ve got to
say
it, for Christ’s sake,” his younger self told him. “What am I supposed to do when you go away?”

“Marry her, doofus,” Justin said. “Live happily ever after, so I get to live happily ever after, too. Why the hell do you think I came back here?”

“For your good time, man, not mine. I’m sure not having a good time, I’ll tell you.”

Was I really that stupid?
Justin wondered. But it wasn’t quite the right question.
Was my event horizon that short?
Holding on to patience with both hands, he said, “Look, chill for a while, okay? I’m doing fine.”

“Sure you are.” His younger self sounded hot. “You’re doing fucking great. What about me?”

Nope, no event horizon at all. Justin said, “You’re fine. Chill. You’re on vacation. Go ahead. Relax. Spend my money. That’s what it’s there for.”

That distracted his younger self. “Where’d you get so much? What did you do, rob a bank?”

“It’s worth a lot more now than it will be then,” Justin answered. “Inflation. Have some fun. Just be discreet, okay?”

“You mean, keep out of your hair.” His younger self didn’t stay distracted long.

“In a word, yes.”

“While you’re in Megan’s hair.” Himself-at-twenty-one let out a long, angry breath. “I don’t know, dude.”

“It’s for you.” Justin realized he was pleading. “It’s for her and you.”

Another angry exhalation. “Yeah.” His younger self hung up.

*   *   *

Everything went fine till he took Megan to the much ballyhooed summer blockbuster two weekends later. She’d been caught up in the hype. And she thought the leading man was cute, though he looked like a boy to Justin. On the other hand, Justin looked like a boy himself, or he couldn’t have got away with this.

But that wasn’t the worst problem. Unlike her, he’d seen the movie before. He remembered liking it, though he’d thought the plot a little thin. Seen through forty-year-old eyes, it had no plot at all. He had a lot less tolerance for loud soundtracks and things blowing up every eight and a half minutes than his younger self would have. And even the most special special effects seemed routine to somebody who’d been through another twenty years of computer-generated miracles.

As the credits finally rolled, he thought,
No wonder I don’t go to the movies much any more.

When Megan turned to him, though, her eyes were shining. “Wasn’t that great?” she said as they headed for the exit.

“Yeah,” he said. “Great.”

A different tone would have saved him. He realized that as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Too late. The one he’d used couldn’t have been anything but sarcastic. And Megan noticed. She was good at catching things like that – better than he’d ever been, certainly. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you like it?”

The challenge in her voice reminded Justin of how she’d sounded during the quarrels before their breakup. She couldn’t know that. His younger self wouldn’t have known, either – he hadn’t been through it. But Justin had, and reacted with a challenge of his own: “Why? Because it was really dumb.”

It was a nice summer night, clear, cooling down from the hot day, a few stars in the sky – with the lights of the San Fernando Valley, you never saw more than a few. None of that mattered to Megan. She stopped halfway to the car. “How can you say that?”

Justin saw the special-effects stardust in her eyes, and the effect of a great many closeups of the boyishly handsome – pretty, to his newly jaundiced eye – leading man. He should have shut up. But he reacted viscerally to that edge in her voice. Instead of letting things blow over, he told her exactly why the movie was dumb.

He finished just as they got to the Toyota. He hadn’t let her get in word one. When he ran down, she stared at him. “Why are you so mean? You never sounded so mean before.”

“You asked. I told you,” he said, still seething. But when he saw her fighting back tears as she fastened her seat belt, he realized he’d hit back too hard. It wasn’t quit like kicking a puppy, but it was close, too close. He had a grown man’s armor and weapons to pierce a grown woman’s – all the nastier products of experience – and he’d used them on a kid. Too late, he felt like an asshole. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“Whatever.” Megan looked out the window toward the theater complex, not at him. “Maybe you’d better take me home.”

Alarm tore through him. “Honey, I said I was sorry. I meant it.”

“I heard you.” Megan still wouldn’t look at him. “You’d better take me home anyhow.”

Sometimes, the more you argued, the bigger the mess you made. This looked like one of those times. Justin recognized that now. A couple of minutes sooner would have been better. “Okay,” he said, and started the car.

The ride back to her folks’ house was almost entirely silent. When he pulled up, Megan opened the door before the car stopped rolling. “Goodnight,” she said. She started for the front door at something nearly a run.

“Wait!” he called. If that wasn’t raw panic in his voice, it would do. She heard it, too, and stopped, looking back warily, like a frightened animal that
would
bolt at any wrong move. He said, “I won’t do that again. Promise.” To show how much he meant it, he crossed his heart. He hadn’t done that since about the third grade.