Chapter 40: Disclosure

Tuesday, January 12, 1982

D-for-Disclosure Day was here. I imagine that classes happened. We had some quizzes that I probably answered correctly. I don’t think my mind spent much time in the building, though.

A year and a half of trying to pretend to everyone in the world (except Angie, for half that time) that there was nothing too unusual about me was about to change. Irrevocably. It could be a huge positive. It could be a terrible mistake. Only time would tell.

Angie and I hopped in the car at four and headed to Dr. Stanton’s office. I had enough cash with me to pay her anything reasonable, but I figured we’d work that out as we went.

She greeted us as we came in and welcomed us back. We switched seating arrangements, sitting side by side on the couch, holding hands. She had papers ready; Angie and I read over them, then signed. She signed the contract. We discussed payment; we were asking for her professional services, after all. Plus, the contract required payment. We came up with a fair price and prepaid for several sessions. Dr. Stanton barely blinked at two teenagers having that sort of cash on hand.

I took a deep breath. It was time.

Dr. Stanton, meanwhile, looked at us. “So, how are we doing ... whatever we’re doing?”

Angie nodded to me. “Steve can talk first. In some ways, it might make sense to go the other order, but, well, he figured me out before I figured him out. So, he gets to go first. Besides, I’m too nervous.”

Dr. Stanton blinked. “You mean, you meant what you said, Steve? That your stories aren’t the same?”

I nodded. “I’ll explain. And the hardest part is right up front. Then there are a lot of nuances. Many of which we still are only guessing at.”

“Um ... OK. I’ll be quiet and give you the floor.”

“OK, well, I’ve been thinking about how to approach this for a while, and I just can’t think of a way to ease into it. By one measure, I’m fifteen, going on sixteen. We both are.” Dr. Stanton smiled at the reference. “By another measure I’m fifty-six going on fifty-seven and Angie is thirty-three.”

Dr. Stanton blinked. Twice. “I ... fountain of youth? No, that makes no sense.”

“I was born in 1966 ... twice, um ... maybe. Ignore that; it’ll get complicated. Anyway. I grew up, graduated from Memorial.” She blinked. “Went to UT, then graduate school at Purdue. I moved to California, got married. Moved back to Austin. Tried to have kids; failed. Adopted two, raised them through high school. Got divorced, lost my job, found a new one in New Jersey. My first time in Atlantic City, a runaway truck smashes into my taxicab. I’m a goner, no question. Except that I wake up at the bottom of a slope a mile from the house I grew up in. In the body I grew up in. Fourteen years old, with a splitting headache that turns out to be a concussion.”

She blinked several times. “Y ... you...”

“Died, yes. Or, I think I did. There’s no instruction manual, not so far. I don’t know why. Or who, or what. God? The gods? Nature? Some mad scientist? I have no idea. I considered the idea that I’d had a particularly vivid hallucination for a few days.”

“What made you give that up?”

“Details. For instance, um ... it’s hard to phrase this, but I think it’s clear ... the ‘real’ fourteen-year-old me did not know calculus at any point. I took that starting at seventeen. Now? I know it, and I can prove that I know it. Along with a smattering of differential equations, and a bunch of things like Theory of Computation and Operations Research that are upper division or graduate-level courses.”

“OK. That’s ... reasonable evidence ... um ... I think. Sorry, I can’t stay quiet.”

“I didn’t expect you to. Anyway, so, when I woke up at the bottom of the hill, I got up, climbed the hill, and called for help. Mom and Dad arrived. Same Mom and Dad, same car. I think it’s important that the very first thing I thought of was calling Mom and Dad. Not calling 911. Not trying to fix it myself. Calling in the parents.” She nodded at that.

“On the way to the hospital, I said to Mom that I was sorry and that I couldn’t believe I was riding on that hill, since I’d wiped out there two years before. No serious injuries, but I damaged my clothes — fancy clothes — and I was all bloody. Two hours before a church event.”

“Does sound like something you’d avoid.”

“Mom had never heard of such a thing. No wreck, no torn clothes, no blood.”

She blinked again. Looking more uncertain. “I get to the hospital. Now, it’s not the first time I’ve been in the hospital. I had an appendectomy — a bad one, ruptured — in eighth grade. Scared Mom and Dad to death. Only ... no appendectomy. No scar.”

More blinking. “In elementary school, a friend and I were goofing around. I got a concussion. Except, apparently, I didn’t.”

“This is ... I...”

“So, I’m lying there, and Mom says Dad went home. Well, he’d have work, things to do. No, Mom says, then adds ‘he went home to take care of your sister.’” She nodded. “Dr. Stanton, I never, ever, had a sister in those fifty-five years. Angie was my cousin, nothing more. We barely knew each other. I last saw her in ... well, 1982. The summer of. At the funeral for her father.”

“I...”

“So, I’m lying in the hospital. Obviously, much is the same, but I’ve also been hit with these big things that don’t line up with my memories of my personal history.”

“You ... OK, pardon me, but ... you ... definitely ... there’s a maturity ... but you’re not fifty-six or whatever. I know people that age. That’s just ... no.”

“I agree. I’m fifteen, or ... fifteen-ish ... and I was fourteen then. The problem is that I clearly remember being thirty, and forty, and fifty. But I didn’t wake up fifty-five, I woke up ... um ... more fourteen than not? It’s complicated.”

She bit her cheek. Nodded. “Go on.”

“That night, the dreams started. Remember, I’m in the hospital. My memory of ‘yesterday’ is getting on a plane at an airport they won’t build for twenty years and flying to a city I’ve never been to and being smashed by a truck. I don’t know anyone except a few really significant people. The dreams ... I dreamed of things that happened, this time. The dreams filled in my memories of what happened weeks and months ago.”

“That’s part of how you’re fifteen. Fourteen, then.”

I nodded. “Dr. Stanton, it’s bizarre to remember that on my fourteenth birthday I went out with my parents and that I went out with my parents and my almost-but-not-yet sister. Or that in the summer of 1980 I took a family trip to California. And stayed home with my new sister.”

She blinked. “You remember both?”

I nodded. “The ‘old’ memories have mostly faded, like other forty-year-old memories. But they’re there.”

“I don’t know what to say. This is...”

“I’ll go on. Please be patient. I know it’s hard to be quiet sometimes, though. I’d be struggling with it.”

“OK.”

“First time through, I was a nerd.” She laughed. “Nerdier than I am. Overweight. Math and computer obsessed. And with Dungeons & Dragons. I had a great English teacher sophomore year who put the love of words back into my life, and I took Debate on a whim. Loved it, did pretty well. I didn’t, however, date anyone until nearly the end of undergraduate school. I went to one dance in High School, and it was at a summer program.”

“You changed,” she laughed, softly.

“I decided to, in the hospital. What would be the point of making the same mistakes when I could make new ones?”

“What, indeed?”

“The first time, I barely knew Candice. I don’t know what happened. Lots of other people are the same; others are ... well ... let me get back to that. The thing is, my life is very different this time. The big picture is almost entirely the same.”

“So, you know the future?”

“The same way that you can, say, remember day-to-day details from when you were in high school.”

“I see.”

“I know the future better in, say, 2021 than I do in 1982. But I know things about 1982.”

“Give me a 1982 thing.” I looked at Angie; she nodded. We’d gotten on the same page here.

“Brezhnev is going to die sometime this year. They’ll replace him with, I think, Chernenko. Or maybe Andropov. I might have the order backwards. Whoever gets the job dies shortly thereafter, then the other one gets it. Then they die and Gorbachev takes over, and that lasts for a few years.”

“Um ... OK. Well, that’s a lot more specific than I was thinking I’d get.”

I laughed. “Best one I could come up with. Oh, here’s one more. There’s going to be a noteworthy movie this year that’s oddly appropriate to our previous conversations. ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’. Spielberg directs it. Is directing it now, maybe. Short, kinda-cute, kinda-ugly juvenile alien gets lost on Earth and befriends some human kids who help him get home. He can only speak a few words of English. One of his most important utterances is ‘E.T. phone home!’ It’ll make a ton of money and people will love it.”

She shook her head. “That ... I ... the implications...”

“Believe me, we know, or at least are trying to keep them in mind. Anyway. Look, I can run through details of my past all night, but that’s not the point right now. I’m fifteen but also can remember being a mature adult, parent ... all that. That lets me draw on experiences I shouldn’t have. It’s brutally unfair for math competitions; that’s one reason I dropped them. I’d look like a savant when I’m much more just ... unreasonably educated.”

She nodded. “I get that. A very interesting problem, especially from a moral viewpoint.”

“Let me get back to people. Angie and I developed a concept I call ‘ripples’. Whenever we do something — literally whenever — we’re sending out ripples that change the world. We can’t help it. She didn’t even exist at Memorial in my first life. She didn’t intersect my first life after 1982; we lost touch. Every friend we have, everything we do ... all different. I’ve uprooted virtually everything about my life; I can’t repeat what I did before. I’m not the same person. You and I never met; why in the world would we have?”

She blinked again. “I should look at you like I’d look at a patient who believes he’s Napoleon. But ... I believe you, which worries me for my sanity!”

Angie laughed softly. “Don’t worry yet. We’ll give you more reasons to worry.”

“I was terrified you’d say that.”

“Just pausing on that observation — this is why we wanted to talk to someone. Ethics, morals. I know hit songs that won’t be written for decades. Plots to books, movies. I’ve pledged to never use them, but can I avoid it? And can I manage the temptation? What about, say, knowing that a terrible accident is coming in a few years? Do I owe the people involved an effort to save them, even though I didn’t cause it and would have great difficulty doing anything? Should I devote my life to becoming someone who can change the course of negative events? Or does ‘fixing’ something mean something bigger is going to go wrong later? If I change something, can I predict the consequences that will result from my actions?”

“Oh. Oh my. I hadn’t ... that’s...” She hesitated. “You need your own field of ethics!”

“Let me stop. Questions so far?”

She laughed. “Ten million? Um ... easy one, that I know the answer to. This life, or the previous one? If you were picking.”

“This one. Hands down. No question. It’s far better, even with the heartache something like Candice gave me, something that never happened my first time. I have to wonder if first-life Candice just died.”