Chapter 3: I’m Back?

To understand my confusion, you need to understand one more thing about me. There was another major side-effect of the blood poison/brain damage issue the military caused. Most of my dreams became incredibly lifelike to the point where I would often become confused when I woke up. It would take me a while to figure out if I was in another dream or if I was awake. If in my dream, I was in bed, I could wake up and not realize where the dream ended, and reality began. It first manifested itself one night when I was asleep on ship. I dreamed I was in my rack asleep and was woken up to go on watch, so that is what I did. I got up and prepared to go on watch. I entered the Machinery Control Room (MCR), and everybody looked at me funny. I wasn’t due to come on watch for another 3 hours. Nobody woke me up, and I should have been in bed sleeping.

Now, here I was, in a spaceship far from home and about to run into a quantum singularity. There was no stopping or turning from its path. I was travelling too fast for that and didn’t have enough warning. My only course of action was to fly through it and hope for the best.

There are basically two thoughts when it comes to how time travel will affect you. The first is, if you travel back in time, you will somehow be protected and remain the same age. This means the adult you can go back and talk to the child you. The second is, your body is affected the same as the time around you. This means if you go back in time ten years, then you will be ten years younger. Nobody knows if you will retain the knowledge and experience you gained in those ten years. You can still run into the younger you, but you may be identical clones in every way, including memories. You may also retain all the knowledge and experiences of the ten years. Nobody knows.

That isn’t what happened. My spaceship hit the quantum singularity, and the next moment I figured that I was knocked out and dreaming.

In this dream or whatever it is, I am sitting in a High School desk, and the kid behind me punches me in the back of the head as hard as he can. To me, what confirms this is a dream is how quickly I respond. I’m a 69-year-old man. I don’t react like a teenager anymore, yet I responded with lightning reflexes. I know how to fight, not just because of the years of abuse and fighting. When I left home as a teen, I promised myself I would never be the underdog again. I spent the next 30 years going from dojo to dojo learning one martial art after another. I would stay long enough to learn what it took to defeat that martial art, then move on to the next one. There was a time when fighting was what I was best at, and I trained to fight professionally, no holds barred. That’s MMA before it was called MMA.

Dean, the kid that hit me, is just withdrawing his fist from the back of my head. I pivot in my desk reaching back and stepping up. I grab his fist, put him in an armbar and slam his face down squarely on top of my seatback. Everybody in the room could hear his nose break. I still think I am dreaming, but I’m in my grade 9 math class, I’m 14 again and reliving events how I wished things had happened, instead of how they did happen.

When I was 14, I was bored to death of school. I was smarter than all my teachers. They hated having me in their classes because I was either snoring or correcting them in a not so polite fashion. What made matters worse, my nose had been broken so many times that I snored loudly, even when face down.

My math teacher was a real asshole. He didn’t just wake me up as every other teacher did. He would get the kid sitting behind me, the biggest kid in the class, to punch me in the back of the head as hard as he could. I’m sure this would have been a deterrent to a normal kid, but when you are used to gang-beatings of 10-20 people at a time, a single punch to the head is like a fly landing on your neck.

Here I am, holding Dean in an armbar. The class and teacher are looking at me in shock. I look at the teacher and inform him, “You will want to follow us to the Principal’s office so you can explain yourself.” I then grab Dean by the ear and drag his sorry ass to the Principal’s office. I enter the school office and drop Dean in a chair. “I’m sorry for the mess Miss Simpson (the office secretary). Can you get him some Kleenex, please? Oh, and don’t pinch his nose. It’s broken.”

Mr. Flanigan, the teacher, is a ways behind us. He stayed to give the class instruction before following.

After dropping Dean off in the chair, I knock on the Principal’s door. He says, “Come in,” so I do and close the door behind me.

“You wonder why I am always getting into fights?”

“What is it this time,” the Principal asks.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have your teachers demand students hit me in the back of the head. Dean is sitting out there with a broken nose, and Mr. Flanigan is on his way.”

“Is that how you think you will get out of it this time?”

“If you do not believe me, there is a classroom full of witnesses. Your teacher is going to come in here and make up some lie. If you have any brains at all, you will head to the class and ask them what happened. Doofus is going to rely on the fact that you will believe him and Dean over me since I am the school bully, and Dean is such a sweetheart.”

“You should show more respect for your teacher.”

“You want me to respect a man that demands the biggest kid in his class hit me as hard as he can in the back of the head. C3-4 and 4-5 are where the nerves for the arms and heart come out of the spine. If Dean hit me just right, he could have killed me, or I could have permanently lost the use of an arm, and you want me to respect the asshole that ordered him to do it. I will respect him by breaking my foot off in his ass the next time he tries such a stunt.”

“Calm down, I will talk to Mr. Flanigan, and we will sort it out.”

That sets me off, “Gee, thanks. Yet again you take the word of a lying dumb ass over me. Forget it. I will just call Mom to come get me, and I’ll clean out my locker. Prick.” I leave his office, slamming the door. “Miss Simpson, he will want you to phone Mom again. Sorry, it is bad enough the kids won’t leave me alone. Having the teachers demand students hit me in a way that can cause permanent and possibly fatal damage is ridiculous.”

Dean asks, “What do you expect when you snore in all your classes?”

“You see, he even admits it in front of you. Would you mind telling Mr. Babcock when he calms down? I’m going to get my books. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Miss Simpson nods her head in agreement, and I take off to collect my books for my suspension. I start clueing in that this isn’t a dream. Dreams don’t come with this much pain. I’m not talking about pain from being hit. That’s nothing. I’m talking about the pain in my legs.

When I was 14, I had significant leg issues. While I was a young child, my mother refused to correct my posture. I would walk out-toed, meaning my toes didn’t point ahead as they should. They were pointed 45 degrees out. This causes something called Attenuated Patella Alta. This is when your kneecaps never fully develop, they ride in the wrong place, so they don’t do their job, and your stabilizer muscles in the leg are overtaxed, so they are constantly tearing. Add to this the fact that I can lift 1000 lb with my legs, and years before this, I had my legs dislocated in a fight.

The dislocation never healed. The main muscles in my leg would constantly rip the stabilizers apart, even when I was at rest. My knees were so bad I could be standing there, and they would spontaneously dislocate. It happened so often I learnt to relocate my knee and stand up again before I hit the ground. The surgery to fix the problem was risky. When I was 17, I finally got to see a specialist. He told me the chances are the operation wouldn’t work, and I would be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. He recommended I waited until it was bad enough that I was confined to a wheelchair before I got the surgery. It isn’t until I am in my 30s and in the military, I figure out how to fix the problem. As a 69-year-old man, I had better knees than when I was a 14-year-old kid.

How, might you ask, was I able to join the military with such bad knees? Simple, I was a northerner. The farther north you lived, the less the government gave a shit. My medical file was lost on three different occasions, not counting the twice the military deliberately lost it to prevent having to pay out benefits. Most of the entrance medical was looking at my medical history. With no medical file, I had no medical history.

The next thing that clued me in to the fact that I wasn’t dreaming was when I got to my locker. I couldn’t remember the combination to my lock. My dreams tended to be realistic. If I was dreaming that I was 14, then I should have the knowledge of my 14-year-old self and would have been able to open the locker.

At 14, my hands had only been broken a few times, and I still had enough feeling and control that I could crack a combination lock. That is what I did. I got the first two numbers right away; then, I remembered the third.

Everything is all starting to seem too real. If this is a lifelike dream, there is no way I wouldn’t remember the combination. The dream is of me as a 14-year-old kid, and as a 14-year-old, there is no way I could forget the combination.

When I get back to the office, Dean is still sitting there. It’s like they forgot him. I sit down a couple seats over, and say, “Listen, Dean, I regret having to hurt you, but there are enough people that harass me. If I were to let that go, it would have made my life even harder.”

Dean tries to defend himself, “You did kind of deserve it. You snore in every class. I try so hard for my grades. You don’t even try, and you get the material. All you would have to do is hand in your homework, and you would get straight A’s, but you don’t even do that.”

“Do you think you would have fun if they stuck you in grade one, and you had to go through all that schooling again even though you’ve passed it already, and there is nothing for you to learn there? I don’t want to be here anymore than you want me here. They tell me I don’t deserve to be skipped ahead because of all the fights I get into. Every fight I have gotten into since kindergarten is because the teachers and principals have been too lazy to do their fucking jobs, and I get picked on or get gang beatings regularly. If I don’t go after the bullies, one on one, they have no reason to fear coming after me in groups. Do you think it is fun always walking around with a long list of injuries? Since grade 3, I haven’t had a chance to fully heal between fights.”

“Can’t you just quit school or skip classes? You make it harder for the rest of us just being here.”

“If I quit at my age, the police will force me back to school. If I skip, they fail me, and my problem is even worse. As I said, I do not want to be here anymore than you want me to be.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be here.”

“That is what I have been saying ... It looks like they forgot you. The longer it takes them to send you to get your nose set, the more it will hurt when it is set. Do you want me to fix it for you?”

“I’m not sure I would trust a classmate over a doctor.”

“Really!!!! Whichever doctor you get has probably set 4 or 5 noses in his life. I set mine up to 4 or 5 times a week. I think I have a bit more experience at it than him.”

“I still want the pain killers first.”

“It will hurt about the same. As I said, the longer it takes them to get you to emergency, the more painful it is.”

This conversation bothers me. If this were a dream, why would we be having this conversation? The dream is about what I would do differently, not about convincing Dean I am not a bad guy. He should be out of the dream, and I should be arguing with the Principal and teacher by now.

We sit there for a few more minutes in silence. I break the silence, “You know I would have to hurt a lot fewer people if you help me to get the Principal to force the teachers not to encourage kids to hit me.”

Dean confesses, “I was thinking about that. I just don’t want to get in trouble for punching you.”

“You won’t get in trouble. Do you know how many people have attacked me in this school? Each time I am the only one they send home. Trust me; nobody cares that you hit me.”

I get up and knock on the Principal’s door. He screams out, “What?”

I stick my head in, saying, “Dean should really go to the hospital to get his nose checked out. I think his mom would be a bit upset to know you forced him to sit here for this long without treatment. I would also suggest talking to him before the ambulance arrives.” I do not close the door or give him a chance to respond, “Miss Simpson, he said you should phone for an ambulance then call Dean’s parents.” Dean nods his head in a silent thank you. I close the door and sit back down.

A minute later, Mr. Flanigan storms out of the office and the Principal calls in Dean. Before Dean gets up, I start in on the Principal, “I told you that you would believe whatever lie that doofus was selling. If you had any honour at all, you would have talked to the class. I love how you always consider me guilty until proven innocent.”

He ignores me. When he is finished with Dean, he comes out to talk with me in the outer office. “You can head back to class. We aren’t sending you home. Dean said you apologized, and he is fine with that.”

This news doesn’t surprise me or make me happy. I retort, “So Mr. Doofus gets away with forcing one student to hit another. You understand that by doing nothing, all you do is make things worse for me. You’re proclaiming to all your teachers that it is OK to coerce the other students to attack me, and you proclaim to all the students that it is OK to attack me. Granted, you make that proclamation to the students every time you suspend me and let my attacker off with a flimsy warning. Thank you for making my life a living hell. You know what? I’m phoning the police. This is child abuse.”

“It is not. You can’t challenge my authority like that.”

“If it were one instance, it wouldn’t be child abuse. This is the second year where time after time, you have told the school to kick the shit out of me every chance you got. You shouldn’t be the Principal. You should be in jail, getting raped daily. Besides, it isn’t just you. It’s my parents, every Principal, and every teacher I have had in this school district. I am phoning the police, then family services. If nobody will listen in this shithole of a town, then I know people that will. You have abused me enough.”