Chapter 14
The drive was long. My driver’s license was expired, but I still took over as we entered California to give Lyle a break.
Lyle filled the time with steady conversation.
I asked questions to prod him along. I didn’t want him to stop talking, but every time he asked questions about me, about my life or our shared family history, I forced myself to think and answer carefully.
He was as curious about me and my life as I was his.
And I only had these brief snatches of time to get things right.
It was a conversation that should’ve taken place over a period of years, in a dozen different settings, as I watched Lyle grow into a man.
But I was left with these fractional days instead.
I knew Lyle felt it, the need to take it all in, to learn what we could about each other.
There were reprieves between the sprawls, sections of bare farmland or cliffs, and I was teleported back to my memories as we rocketed down the highway along the rocky coastline when I was nineteen.
It could almost have been Sophie and Severine there with me, laughing and talking in circles about philosophy and dreams. Young and with our whole lives ahead of us.
Then Lyle and I would hit some new town and I was yanked back to the bizarre new present.
“The world’s a mess,” Lyle said at one point. We’d passed Sacramento, and he was driving again. We were both eating faux-beef burgers and fries. “But it’s always been a mess when you really stop and think about it. When has the world not been a complete and utter mess?”
I shook my head and took another bite. The fake meat was good. Much better than the kind I remembered.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a time when things have really been good, you know?” Lyle waved a fry. “Millions of people around the world have a standard of living that would make Caesar jealous, but billions of others are starving, or at war. Was it any different in your time?”
It felt odd to have him call it my time. “Not really.”
“No, everything was just as messed up ten years ago, a hundred years ago, only in different ways. And I bet every generation thinks their time is the worst time yet, right?”
“Probably.”
“The end of days is always nigh. In the beginning, Christ’s followers were convinced they’d see the Rapture within their lifetimes.
It wasn’t some distant apocalypse, not to them.
They thought it was going to happen in the next few years, because things all around them were so terrible.
And they hadn’t seen the fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages and the bubonic plague yet, or the Holocaust. Humanity takes a step forward and two giant leaps back. ”
I chewed and tried not to show the dissonance I was feeling.
Here was my son, the quiet seven-year-old who liked Michael Crichton books, now a jaded eighteen-year-old Berkeley student with the entire world resting on his slender shoulders.
“I don’t know, Lyle. Maybe it always looks bad in the moment?
I mean, things sound bad, and you have a good point.
But it’s seemed bad a lot of times in the past. Could it be that we just see it more?
With the Internet and twenty-four-hour cable news and whatever else you future people have. ”
He flashed me a grin and pointed a fry in my direction.
“Exactly, Dad. Exactly. It’s not that things are worse than they’ve ever been, we just happen to be living now, and we’re exposed to it all every day, every hour, in ultrahigh-def and 3D and immersion sound.
” He paused, the grin fading, and sighed.
World-weary. “We look back with rose-colored glasses. So many people say they were born in the wrong era. As though they’d have been so much happier in the 1950s, or in Italy during the Renaissance.
Of course, when people say that they’re assuming they’d’ve been princes or kings or wealthy merchants.
Much greater chance they’d be another anonymous member of the crapped-upon peasantry.
A ninety-nine point nine percent better chance. ”
I finished my burger and the last of my fries and sat back. “That’s true. And by that logic, the best possible time to live would be the one in which you have the greatest chance to live a decent life.”
“Yeah. So. When would that be?”
We drove on, both of us lost in our own thoughts, until Lyle’s smartwatch rang. He glanced at the bright circle of the screen on his wrist and avoided looking at me as he tapped something to send the call to voicemail.
“Mom?”
Lyle stared forward, both hands on the wheel. “I’ll call her back later.”
I understood “later” meant “tomorrow.” When I was gone.
We arrived on campus around nine in the evening. I got out of Lyle’s car and stretched. Two days of bus rides and another day in a car on top of the fading bruises from when my car vanished under me meant every joint and muscle ached. My eyes were gritty and raw.
Lyle popped the trunk and pulled out his luggage. “Come on, Dad. Lots of things left to do before tomorrow morning.”
“Like what?” I grabbed one of his bags.
“We need to get something to eat, for one thing. Then get some rest. Five fifty-two AM is going to come early. We’ll need to get you to a safe spot for your next jump forward.”
We parked on the third floor of a ramp filled with aging vehicles, most covered in UC Berkeley stickers. The ramp sat across the street from Lyle’s dorm.
“You have somewhere picked out?” I asked.
He opened a rusty door leading to the stairs. “Bancroft.” He followed me into a stairwell stinking of old urine and vomit.
“Bancroft?”
“One of the libraries. Rare-book collection, one of the biggest in the US.”
I grunted, concentrating on not falling down the stairs with Lyle’s bag.
“It’s old and quiet,” Lyle said. “And there aren’t any plans to tear it down or renovate it that I know of. Of course, anything could change in eleven and a half years.”
I sucked in a breath at the casual way he threw the length of the jump in there. I knew the math, but it still caught me off guard. “Sounds logical.”
We were down another half story when Lyle stopped. I kept going for a few steps before I realized he’d halted. “Bud?”
His brow was furrowed, his lips tight. “Are you okay, Dad?”
I opened my mouth to give him the automatic, meaningless retort.
I stopped. I stood there, in the stinking stairway, and considered.
“Physically, I guess I’m okay. Still banged up from that tumble.
The first jump, I mean. When you were—you were seven.
I’m exhausted, of course, but more mentally exhausted than physically.
I guess I’m freaked out. I should be more disturbed.
I should be losing my mind, probably. It’s way beyond anything. ”
“Like some bizarre dream.”
“Yes. Like I’ll wake up any moment and be back in bed next to Mo—your mom. And everything will be normal.”
He gave me a sad smile. “I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”
“Well. There wasn’t much chance of spontaneously jumping forward in time, but here I am.”
He peered at me. “Okay.” He gestured with one of his bags. “We can keep going.”
I looked him up and down for a second, then continued down the stairwell.
I spent the night in Lyle’s dorm room. He snuck me past the uncaring eye of the bored security guard in the lobby by bending our heads together as though we were in deep conversation as we walked from the front door to the elevator.
Not quite secret-agent stuff. Lyle gave me his roommate’s bunk against the wall opposite his.
The mattress was unyielding, and the sheets smelled of unwashed feet and body odor, but it was available.
Lyle’s roommate had gone home for the summer.
That night, a few minutes after Lyle switched off the light, he spoke. “Dad?”
“Yeah, bud?”
He didn’t answer right away. Then, “Good night.”
It was another of those moments. A hinge: a moment upon which so much turned, where just a few sentences, even a couple carefully chosen words, could make a lifetime of difference.
A host of possibilities ran through my mind, a hundred different ways I might spark the conversation I so desperately wanted to have with my son, but I couldn’t make my mouth form the words.
I saw all the ways I could screw things up.
All the ways I’d say something that he’d have eleven and a half years to ruminate on, to chew and misremember and use to damage his memory of me, without me having a chance to fix it.
I replied on automatic, listening to myself say the words. “Good night, bud.”
I spent a long time awake, staring up at the ceiling, outlined in gray in the dim light from the room’s window, listening to the even sound of Lyle’s breathing as he slept.
I jumped again at 5:52 AM Pacific daylight time.
I stood in a corner between two high rows of ancient, ragged-looking books on the first floor of the Bancroft Library, the now-familiar ache rising behind my eyes. Lyle was with me.
“I’ll be waiting” was the last thing he said.
Then the world slipped sideways, fractionally and momentarily, before righting itself once again. The light shifted, and the books on the shelves jumped to different positions and aged before my eyes.
In front of me stood a man near thirty years old, long brown hair combed back and held in a tight ponytail behind his head.
A scruffy beard lined his chin. He wore a black button-down shirt and black trousers, both of which emphasized his thin frame and wide shoulders.
Large, expressive brown eyes met mine. “Right on time,” he said. “Right on time.”
“Lyle?”
“Hi, Dad,” he said. His eyes moved between mine, back and forth. “Eleven years. But you’re exactly as I remember.”
“Lyle.” I stepped up next to him. I raised my arms and enfolded him in an embrace. He was stiff and unyielding.