Chapter 1 #4
Looking back, I felt badly for him. It must have been hard, living alone with me, because in those days a single man with a child was pretty rare.
He wasn’t exactly welcome around other married couples, but he was too old to be hanging out with the local single men, most of whom were just a few years out of high school.
He largely let me do what I wanted and tolerated my banging on the basement piano.
He even bought me a cheap Radio Shack microphone for singing.
But he did make one thing abundantly clear: rules. No leaving the kitchen before the dishes were washed. No exiting the bathroom unless the dirty towels were in the hamper. No television during the day. No loud music at night.
In the silent vacuum of my mother’s absence, rules were what my father used to reset his balance.
I had my own resets.
?
My mother had been right. I was able to do anything twice.
It took me a while to master the technique, like a baby Superman learning to fly.
But once I got the hang of it, I began taking second chances at anything that went wrong the first go--around.
What kid wouldn’t? A bad grade on a spelling test?
I went back and aced it. A strikeout in a baseball game?
I relived the at bat, this time knowing what pitches to expect.
If I mouthed off and got punished, I repeated the encounter and kept my mouth shut the second time.
Consequently, I rarely paid a price for bad behavior.
And unlike most kids, I was never bruised or bloodied for more than a few seconds.
As long as I could jump back in time, I could unbreak every broken bone and untwist every twisted ankle.
Physical danger became a challenge. When other boys my age thought risk--taking meant looking up fart in the dictionary, I was skating into holes on the ice or jumping off the roof over our garage.
Best of all, this power enabled me to undo the embarrassments of my often--distracted personality. Once, in fourth grade, I was staring out the window, daydreaming, when the teacher asked me to “name any one of the classification of organisms.”
I froze.
“Organisms?” I said.
“Yes, Alfie. Name one.”
All I could think of was the “organ” part.
“The kind you play in church?”
The room erupted in laughter. Tommy Helms, who was nearly twice my size and a brute on the football field, blurted out, “He’s an idiot.
He doesn’t even have a mother.” The teacher turned to scold him, but before she finished her sentence, I had transported myself back to the breakfast table that morning, where, over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, I opened my science book and began memorizing.
Later that day, while I was staring out the window—-deliberately this time—-the teacher asked me the same question, and I turned to her slowly.
“Organisms?”
“Yes, Alfie. Name one.”
I saw Tommy Helms sneering. I waited for maximum effect. Then I stood up.
“Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.”
My teacher blinked. “Yes. Wow. That’s all of them. Excellent, Alfie.”
I gave Tommy a look, then sat back down. It was all I could do to keep from laughing.
?
You may have noticed I no longer had to sleep to make my second chances happen.
Nor did I have to call myself “stupid.” Through trial and error, I learned I only had to say or think the word twice and tap any part of my body.
That took me back to somewhere earlier that day.
If I wanted to go back further, I could, but I had to focus on the event I wanted to revisit.
This required meticulous record--keeping. I began to chart my daily activities in composition notebooks. When I got up. Where I rode my bike. Who I ate lunch with at school.
“Why are you always writing in those notebooks?” my dad asked.
“I like to keep track of things.”
“Like a diary?”
“No. Diaries are for girls.”
The truth was, I needed data to make my jumps. Other-wise, I might repeat something unintended, which sometimes happened anyway.
One day I was craving chocolate ice cream really badly, so I focused on my last visit to Custard King, which I remembered as two weeks earlier with my father.
I pictured the car ride in my head. I mumbled twice, tapped my leg, and instantly landed in the backseat of our Plymouth.
Only then did I see empty cups and discarded spoons on the floor, and I realized I had remembered it incorrectly.
I had actually walked to Custard King with friends, and Dad had picked us up.
So not only was there no ice cream that day, but I was stuck reliving the next two weeks all over again.
And yes, I have to go forward in real time. No skipping back to the present. I return to the age I was with each jump and continue on from there.
Which is why I say that nobody knows how long I have been on this earth. If you took all the repeated hours, days, months, and years, I would guess it is many lifetimes. It feels that way, anyhow.
?
My best friend during those years was a kid named Wesley, who was older than me but for some reason didn’t start school until he was seven, so we were in the same grade.
We didn’t have a lot of Black families in our neighborhood, and he and his younger sister, London, were constantly getting picked on.
Maybe that’s why we took to each other. That, and I had been to Africa, which his parents seemed to like.
Wesley wore horn--rimmed glasses and built model rocket ships in his basement.
When America sent Apollo 11 to the moon, he was so excited, he kept a daily scrapbook.
He cut up newspaper stories and pasted them on dated pages labeled with colorful penmanship.
It was meticulous, and he was rightly proud of it.
One day, for science class, he brought that scrapbook to school.
As we walked down the hallway, a couple of older boys surrounded us and demanded to see what Wesley was holding. One of them was Alan Ponto, a loud, stocky kid who was already growing whiskers on his chin. He leafed through the scrapbook and said, “Hey, this page is cool.”
“Thanks,” Wesley said.
“Wanna know what makes it cooler?”
He tore the page out, ripped it in half, then ripped up the pieces. “That’s cooler.”
Wesley burst into tears.
“Aw, did I make the little nerd cry?” Alan mocked.
Poor Wesley. Crying was the worst thing he could have done. A group of students quickly gathered, laughing as he wiped his eyes and hugged his scrapbook to his chest.
I felt so bad for him that I tapped back to when Wesley and I were walking to school.
I thought about telling him to hide his scrapbook in his desk.
Then I decided on something else. Once inside, I ran to the science teacher, Mr. Timmons, and told him to come quickly, some boys were threatening to destroy Wesley’s project.
We arrived just as Alan was tearing the page out.
“Young man, what are you doing?” Mr. Timmons said.
Alan spun around, surprised.
“Huh?”
“You just desecrated another student’s work. Do you think that’s funny?”
“Huh?”
The kids who had previously gathered to mock Wesley were now poking each other. Many had been victims of Alan’s bullying; they weren’t missing his comeuppance.
“Can you tell me the properties of tape, Alan?”
“Huh?”
“The properties of tape,” Mr. Timmons said. “Polypropylene, for starters. You’re going to learn a lot about them, since you’ll be taping every bit of that page very carefully back into Wesley’s scrapbook.”
“Huh?”
“Young man, do you know any words besides Huh?”
At that point, even Wesley cracked a smile.
He taught me something that morning. He taught me that this gift I have could actually make things better for other people. You might think, having learned this, that I spent the rest of my life in altruistic endeavors.
I didn’t. I wish I had. The truth is, you never do as much good as you could.
?
Things my mother said she loved about me:
“Your laugh.”
“How you sleep with your arms under your pillow.”
“Your courage, even when you’re scared.”
One day, during a field trip to the zoo with my sixth-grade class, I was standing with a couple of girls near the lion exhibit.
One of the girls was named Esther, and I kind of liked her, in the way that a sixth-grade boy likes a girl, which is awkward and without reciprocation.
I was stealing a glance at her pinkish cheeks when one of the big cats roared, and I jumped backward.
“You got spooked,” Esther said, giggling.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did! I thought you lived in Africa. Aren’t you used to lions?”
I looked away. My new response to embarrassment like this was a quick time jump to correct it. But hoping to impress Esther, I took a bolder tact.
“Lions don’t scare me,” I bragged. “If I wanted to, I could play with them right now.”
“Play with lions?”
“Sure. We did it every day in Africa.”
(We did no such thing. I saw one lion the entire time I was there.)
Quickly, Esther’s friends jumped in. “Do it!” “I dare you!” “I double dare you!” But Esther changed her tone. “Wait, you’re messing around, right, Alfie?”
I straightened up, chuff with phony bravery.
“Watch me.”
The exhibit was protected by a high fence, then a long space, then a wall behind which the lions roamed freely.
Reminding myself all I had to do was tap my body and say twice, I jumped onto the fence and shimmied up.
I heard Esther yell, “Alfie, no!” but I was already over.
I looked back and grinned at the girls with their hands over their mouths.
I saw two lions lift their heads and one rise on its paws.
I trembled but kept moving forward. I could hear the screams of people beyond the fence.
Another step. Another step. The largest lion began pacing, eyeballing me.
Although I had done this to impress a girl, I was now hypnotized by the danger.
I eased over the low stone wall and took two more strides in the animals’ direction.
The lion growled. I saw his ears flatten and his tail sweep from side to side. Then, just like that, he broke into a sprint, charging straight at me, head low, mouth open. I slapped my legs, yelled “Twice!” and immediately was face down in my pillow that morning, my heart going like a drill.
I lay there for a minute, the sunlight spilling through the window, still seeing that beast coming at me.
It was frightening, yes. But exhilarating.
As alive as I’ve ever felt. I could have died in that moment, Boss, yet I didn’t.
And I foolishly gave myself the credit for that.
It was the start of an addiction to invincibility.
A belief that nothing I did the first time could hurt me.
It was also a realization that, for all these chances I was taking, I was the only one to reflect on my bravery.
Later that day, when our class (again) went to the zoo, I stood next to Esther.
When that lion roared, I didn’t flinch. I didn’t say a thing.
I wanted to brag, “Hey, I just ran into his cage! He was this close to eating me!” But it’s not like I had any proof.
My first chances let me be Superman. My second chances, I was stuck as Clark Kent.
Nassau
“Wait,” LaPorta said. “What year was that? The lion cage thing?”
“I’m not sure,” Alfie said. “Maybe 1969, or ’70?”
“An incident like that would be reported. Even written about in a local newspaper.”
“Probably.”
“I can cross--check it in a database. We can prove if your story is true right now. Where did you say that happened? Philadelphia?”
He rose from his seat.
“You’re wasting your time, Detective.”
LaPorta turned. “Why?”
“Once I undo something, no record of my first actions exists. That was one reality, but we’re in this one now. The one where I just stood there and never approached that cage.”
“What are you talking about?” LaPorta snapped.
“I can’t explain the physics. I can only tell you that my second--chance life is the one the rest of this world is witnessing. I’m the only one who remembers the things I undid.”
“And that means . . . ?”
“It means you’re not going to find anything.”
LaPorta rubbed his chin. He held for a moment. Then he dropped back into his chair.
“Well, isn’t that convenient for you.”
He took out his phone and pressed a number.
“Who are you calling?” Alfie asked.
“I ask the questions,” LaPorta replied.
Actually, he was still trying to reach his contact with the Bahamian police, a young officer named Sampson, who was supposed to be rounding up the casino staff for questioning. When no one answered, he hung up the phone and blew out a mouthful of air.
“Shall I continue?” Alfie asked.
“For now,” LaPorta said.