Chapter 2

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

FUCK!

I came out of my coma with a gasp that nearly ripped my throat out. Beeps and alarms rang and people started skittering about like cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on. Everything hurt. I should have asked for an inventory of my injuries. I get that I stepped out in front of a bus, but why did my eyes and fingernails hurt?

It was hard to tune in what people were saying. Somebody was waving fingers in front of my face and asking how many I could see. Stupid fucker. How was I supposed to answer? I had tubes down my throat and both hands were in a cast. If there’s an afterlife one day instead of a transfer to an alternate reality, I’m going to find my other self and kill him.

Well, I was awake, more or less. They adjusted drips in my IV and a little of the pain faded. Enough that I could focus. Once the quacks satisfied themselves that I was alive, they let my mother get close enough to see for herself.

“Oh, Jakey, you’re back. Please stay with us, baby boy. Please don’t ever do this to us again. What did we do that made you hate us so much?”

Mom?

Okay, if I was fourteen then she’d be what ... thirty-eight? The last time I’d seen her was before her last surgery and she was um ... seventy-four. Right before my fiftieth birthday. I celebrated my half-century standing beside her fresh grave. She’d looked so worn and tired before that surgery. Too tired to come out of it, apparently. The woman leaning over me looked tired, too. I wondered if I was the reason.

There was something else, though, besides her being younger than I remembered last. I didn’t remember her ever wearing her hair curled up like a French poodle on top of her head. And she was wearing makeup. Back in 1952, as I remembered it ... well, Mom was no June Cleaver. She dressed nicely enough for housework and got dressed up for church on Sunday. But makeup? What the fuck?

What she was saying didn’t really make a difference since I couldn’t respond. Considering my first thoughts, it was better that way. She rambled on and on but I wasn’t able to pay attention. I guessed they were giving me morphine or something like that because I was getting incredibly scrambled messages from my brain. I guess that’s what the voice had warned me about. I was trying to integrate my memories as an eighty-year-old with my memories as a fourteen-year-old, only they weren’t exactly my memories. They were the memories of someone else who lived in what was now my body.

I recognized some things as they flashed past. My house. I could tell it was the same house but it looked different. The yard was neatly mowed, so maybe my version two self had been responsible enough to take care of it before he tried to off himself. The color was different than I remembered, too. Mom used to describe the house as being ‘baby-shit yellow’ but this was definitely just a pale yellow like cream. Maybe V2 was colorblind. Or maybe my V1 memory was from before the house was painted. Or something.

My bicycle was a lot nicer than I remembered. I could remember imagining that I’d ride it into traffic and get run over but decided to leave it home that day so the bike wouldn’t get destroyed. How considerate of me. I didn’t remember ever having a bicycle that nice.

I wondered when my father would show up in the hospital to tell me what a disappointment I was. At least I assumed that would be the message. It was certainly what Mom was conveying. Did they talk to me like this all the time? No wonder I tried to off myself.

I let my mind wander and it wandered straight to my seventeen-year-old sister. Damn! What a fox. Just that morning, I’d seen her coming out of the shower with just a towel that didn’t quite cover her ass cheeks. I’d gone to my room and beaten off to that vision.

Damn it! I was lying in a hospital room with tubes running in and out of me and casts on my arms and God-knows where else and getting a damned erection. And it hurt, damn it! They must have had a catheter stuck in my prick. I tried to erase the image of my sister and her towel, but I wanted it where I could access it later. Like when I got the damn catheter out. V1 didn’t remember my sister being quite such a fox.

I’d been through life before. Eighty years, ten months, and nine days. I considered myself version one, or just V1. The kid who had been treating my parents like crap for fourteen years was definitely V2. I guess the hybrid, my current life, was V3. I could tell most of my work in this life was making V3 into what I wanted to be. Especially considering what a cockup V2 had been.

It was hard to even consider him to be me. I guess he wasn’t me. But we had the same parents, the same family, as far as I could tell, we had the same school and classmates. What could have been so much worse about his life than what I lived before?

I was suffocating. The walls were pressing in on me. It was dark and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. All I could hear was the thumping of my own pulse in my ears. I screamed but no sound came out.

“Hey. Hey, it’s okay, J. Wake up, brother. You’re safe now. I won’t let you go.”

My eyes snapped open and air filled my lungs like it had been forced there. I choked and coughed, just wanting to inhale more and more. I’d never had dreams of claustrophobia before. What on earth... ? I realized I still couldn’t move. Both arms were in casts down to my fingers. One leg was in a rock up to my balls. My ribs hurt. That was progress. I was able to start naming where the pains were.

“Em?” I croaked. They’d taken out the feeding tube yesterday when they realized I was actually awake and could respond to drinking liquids. I still had tubes running out elsewhere.

“I got the lucky draw to spend the night tonight. Dad went home a couple of hours ago,” she said. “Need some water?” I nodded and she fitted a straw to my lips. My throat was still sore from the tube but my jaw ached as well. Someone said I’d knocked some teeth loose.

“Nightmare,” I said when I’d moistened my mouth. “Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Awful. So scared.”

“It’s your casts and the trauma. Just a dream. It will heal,” she said. “I didn’t let go of you then and I won’t now. J, you had me so scared. I know it’s been hard but don’t quit on me. Please?”

“I ... I’m back, Em. I’ll live. I promise.”

My sister stroked my forehead and hair. I looked up at her in the dimly lit room and saw her breasts a few inches from my face. I grimaced as tumescence fought with my catheter.

“Do you need something more for pain?” she asked. “The nurse said she’d bring something when you needed it.”

“No. It’s okay. Just uncomfortable.”

“Someone needs to wash your hair tomorrow. What a greasy mess.”

“How long?”

“Your hair? Below your ears, like usual. They didn’t have to cut it.”

“How long was I out?”

“Oh. The um ... accident was Sunday. It’s Friday night now. You woke up Wednesday afternoon. They’d just told us ... told us you weren’t going to make it. Then all of a sudden you were awake and choking. I was praying for you, J. The whole time I was asking God to give you another chance.” She leaned in farther and gave me as much of an embrace as possible. I couldn’t lift my arms to return the gesture but I could feel her soft breasts pressed against my chest. Damned cock! I gasped and she pulled away.

“Maybe I should get something for pain after all.” She pressed the bedside button. “Thank you, Em. Thank you for being here and for praying for me.”

I remembered being sort of semi-religious during my teens. We went to church. I prayed. Mostly, I prayed that this girl or that would go out with me. When I was seventeen, I prayed that the girl I was out with would kiss me and promised God that if she did, I’d never kiss another girl. She didn’t. Wouldn’t. Spread the word around that I liked to get right down to business on a date. I thought that was a little unfair since we’d been dating for two months and I just tried to kiss her goodnight. Now I was probably ranked as her #metoo.

Well, we learned. Back in the fifties we were jerks. I got better, more respectful. Didn’t mean I wasn’t a jerk back then. Back now, I supposed. I had to remind myself that I was back in my fourteen-year-old body, even though it hurt worse than my V1 eighty-year-old body. I was probably still a jerk. I’d certainly been waiting in convenient places, hoping to get a glimpse of my big sister’s body.