Chapter 79: A Visit to the Village

Thursday, January 19, 1984

Jess seemed fine all day, which is what I’d expected. The problem is that I expected she’d be fine outside if she was fine inside, or fine outside if she was totally not okay at all inside.

I was still pretty sure it was the former.

As with yesterday, Angie and I both drove. The girls were heading to Pho King after school. Jess and I talked during Drama and settled on Bangkok Thai. It was a long drive, but long drives are good for conversations that should have no eavesdroppers.

We walked to my car after school, holding hands. Jas, Angie, and Paige were with us. I’m sure the grapevine was busy. Even knowing that my girlfriend was fine with this, this was the most Jess and I had been ‘dating’ in a while. The rumor mill would be busy.

We parted with hugs at our cars. I helped Jess in, then hit the road.

“No accidents!” she said.

I chuckled. “Yes, Ma’am! I’ve been back there since, and it went fine.”

“Yeah,” she said. I figured she’d known that I’d been back. Jess missed little.

“As you can probably guess, I’ve been thinking a lot about things.”

“I’d be stunned if you hadn’t,” I said.

“I’m putting off Bev for a bit for a couple of other questions.”

“However you want to do it. I’ll either answer, or tell you why I won’t.”

“Very fair,” she said, then asked, “You have no idea at all why, right?”

That wasn’t a question I’d been prepared for, though I probably should have. Honesty had to be the best policy here. Even given the complicated answer, hiding it was going to be silly.

“I ... there’s a glimmer. Maybe? Maybe not? It’s not really a why, just one of the many things that asks more questions than it answers. For us to get there, there’s a lot of other stuff we probably need to talk about first.”

“Interesting!” she said.

“I didn’t have one for a long time. Even with the glimmer, it’s ... well, it’s like you deciding that someone back in elementary school walking past you in a cheerleading uniform made you want to be a cheerleader.”

“I think it was actually Cheerleader Barbie,” she said, grinning. “But I get it. Vague, and it doesn’t help you do anything else.”

“Exactly. I had to figure everything out myself.”

“Which you did.”

I shrugged. “Maybe God is up there waving His fist because I went so far off the path. How should I know? He isn’t talking to me, if He exists at all.”

“Do you think He is?”

I shrugged again. “I sometimes say things like ‘God, or the Gods, or the Universe, or whatever.’ It seems unlikely to me that there’s literally nothing beyond nature, particularly since it feels like I have direct evidence of a soul. Of course, souls could just be a part of nature. Or, it could be some advanced alien civilization copying people at death and putting them in a world mostly like their former world for some inscrutable reason.”

“Shades of ‘Riverworld’!” she said, smiling.

“I thought of that as I said it. There’s a whole genre of fiction later that’s similar, but using computers far better than the ones we have...”

“‘I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream’,” she said, grinning.

“Okay, that, too. Anyway, and more in the future, quite a few people wrote stories about whole worlds populated entirely by either humans who were connected to computers with neural links or computer-generated people. Maybe I’ve always been a simulation inside a computer, and they just moved my data around.”

“You don’t really think that, though.”

I shook my head. “I can’t rule it out, but it feels wrong to me. Still, if one assumes an infinitely advanced civilization with all the time in the universe on their hands, boredom might cause a lot of crazy things.”

“Indeed. Also, this is a terrific conversation!”

“It is!”

“Okay, so. I have a guess,” she said. “I meant to do that first, but this was better.”

“Go for it.”

She smiled. “I think Angie is like you.”

I nodded. “She is.”

“I knew it! She has the same feeling of being wise beyond her years, but differently.”

“She didn’t live as long as I did, and her first life sucked in different ways than mine did. It’s her story to tell. I’ve got permission to tell it, but I think she expects you to ask.”

“I’ll look forward to it. Um ... okay. Next. I’m going to say ... no one else at Memorial, right?” she said.

“Right. If there was anyone we’d have been suspicious of...”

“It’s me. I get that. Nope, but it’d be cool!”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Why? I think it’d be totally cool!”

“Angie and I both fucked up our first lives. With a few exceptions, we never wanted to rebuild any of it. Burn it all down, start over, do better. There are exceptions — especially our relationships with our parents, for both of us — but few and far between. You’ve got your mistakes, but imagine trying to recreate all of the good moments, knowing you could break stuff and not remembering what you did the first time.”

“Huh,” she said, cocking her head a little. “Okay. I missed that! You’re right. That part would suck.”

“Angie and I are both ... we shape each other’s lives, this time. I had no Angie in my first life. She — my first-life cousin Angie — was in Illinois, either with her mother, Sharon, or in prison. First-life Angie had a Steve after she moved down here, but he was way more of an introvert than I ever was, so he wasn’t much of a help. Plus, she was only at Memorial for her senior year. So, day one of freshman year this time, we were both preventing each other from doing what we did before. Mind you, it took us months to figure each other out.”

“Good job of hiding it! Also, prison?”

“My first-life Angie was deeply into drugs and alcohol and pretty troubled, and I’m sure you know enough about Sharon to know that Sharon was the last person to be able to help that,” I said.

“Got it.”

“I never knew her well at all in that life, and when I came back I was afraid she’d be all the bad things. She never was.”

“Because she was fixing stuff,” Jess said.

“And because she got to Houston three years earlier and was effectively many years older.”

“Right,” she said, then paused. “Okay. We could go through so much stuff, and I want to, but I want to poke at something. That’s where the alternative universes come in? Not just that you’re here and ‘breaking’ things, the way you put it.”

“Right. Angie’s first universe isn’t my first universe, and some things happened or didn’t happen in this universe that we couldn’t possibly have caused to happen or not happen.”

“Such as?”

“Some jerk tried to assassinate Reagan in Angie’s first universe. Not in mine, not in this one. Shot him, didn’t kill him.”

“Ugh!” she said.

“There’s one much closer to home for me. One of my best friends through most of my first life was a guy named Dave, who went to Memorial and then was my roommate in college. His last name was Winton.”

She blinked. “Her older brother? No...”

“Apparently something different happened when Darla was getting started this time. Their birthdates are three days apart, which could pretty much mean anything.”

“That’s freaky!”

“Imagine my surprise when I finally realized who Darla was. Or, wasn’t,” I said.

“That would be about as unexpected as it gets, yes,” she said, then hesitated. After taking a deep breath, she said. “Okay. Time for Bev. Obviously, when you heard her name, it reminded you of something. You and Angie. This?”

I shook my head, then said, “Not this.”

“What, then?”

It was my turn to take a deep breath. “Both of us have mostly the same story, but in my first life, Bev went to Westchester and it was their story, I guess I could put it, so I didn’t know it was coming or even might be. Plus, it was forty years ago. On the other hand, Angie was only at Memorial for a year and barely knew anyone but socialites, so she’d mostly forgotten what happened.”

“Tell me!” she said. “I need to know.”

I looked around. “Can we maybe wait a few minutes on this? I’d like to be parked.”

“That bad?”

“Um ... maybe?”

She sighed. “Okay. I’m really nervous, but I trust you on waiting.”

We made it to Bangkok Thai after maybe five minutes, and I parked out front, then took off my seat belt. She took hers off, too, turning to face me.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell me. Please.”

“Bev ... she killed herself in both universes,” I said.

“No!” Jess gasped, immediately crying.

I scooted over and wrapped her up in my arms, holding her until she settled. It took her a few minutes.

“I... killed her? With my fucking bullshit?” she said, looking up at me, anguished. Either all of her layers were temporarily gone, or this was a spectacular acting job. I was positive it was the former.

Stroking her back, I softly said, “You didn’t kill her, I don’t think, at least not in my universe. Angie may be able to help with hers, but she didn’t know you, or she didn’t pay attention to you. Plus ... Jess, that wasn’t you! Think about me! Asshole Steve, Iceberg Steve. Those Jesses weren’t you! I don’t even know if Bev knew the Jessica Lively of those universes.”

“She did,” Jess said, sniffling. “Junior high. Still...”

She stopped, and let me hand her a kleenex. After blowing her nose, she settled a bit, snuggling in again. “You said Angie didn’t pay attention to me. Who doesn’t pay attention to me?”

“A socialite.”

Jess nodded at that. “Fine, you have a point.”

“Anyway, in my universe, you were pretty and cool and all, but you weren’t... you. You wound up going off to UT, marrying a quarterback, and becoming a housewife.”

“So I maybe didn’t...”

“Probably didn’t. I can’t tell, but I wouldn’t think so. A Jess who became a housewife is probably not even close to the one I know,” I said.

“I should say not! So, that’s another difference.”

“It is.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’m better. I’m sad for those other Bevs, but ... yeah. It wasn’t me. I think it means that I did the right thing, though.”

She paused, then said, “Still...” Then she paused again, and continued, saying, “I could’ve done more for Bev! Faster!”

I could see how she was getting worked up again.

“Could you have?” I said.

“I...” she said, then stopped. That seemed to interrupt wherever her mind was going.

After a second, she said, “I ... don’t know? Could I?”

“It reminds me of Candice, of course,” I said. “I’ve gone over it a hundred ways. If I had a third life, and Candice was the same person I’d known, I’m not sure that I could do better. She’d have denied that anything was wrong and hated me if I brought it up. I’m a big disbeliever in Pangloss’s ‘Best of all possible worlds’ theory, but I don’t know that I could have done better, and I don’t know that you could’ve done better for Bev.”

She sighed. “I could’ve never started it.”

“That’s not you, that’s who you grew out of being. That’s like saying my first-life self could’ve been Homecoming King. He couldn’t. It’s ludicrous. But I’m the same physical person, as far as I know. I’m just also totally different. Sure, if you had another life, and you got that life before starting things with them, you could not start it. But after? Could you have done better? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not? It’s not that simple.”

“I ... I’ll bow to your experience on this one,” she said, mustering a weak laugh.

“Bev is getting care and help. You did what you could when you realized you needed to do something.”

“And if I hadn’t...” she said, then shuddered.

“We don’t know what Bev would have done, but for my money, I’m damn glad you acted.”

She sighed. “Me, too.”

She hesitated a second, then said, “Okay. We’re good. Let’s go get something to eat.”

“That sounds good to me.”

I got out, helped her out, and held her hand. We temporarily suspended anything big until we’d ordered. The restaurant wasn’t very busy (as I’d hoped), so we had freedom to talk unless we said the wrong thing and things got heated.

After we’d ordered (Tom Kha Gai — spicy chicken soup — for her, Pad Thai for me, with both of us drinking Thai iced tea), she reached a hand across the table, and I took it.

“I feel better,” she said. “It helps to think of the other ... me’s ... as failed me’s. I’m aware that you’re... you ... because you had a second chance, but you were still different in your first life, and so was Angie.”

“Most of the people I know are who I think they were,” I said, “but ... see, I don’t even know if that’s true.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Well, okay. Take Mike. I think Mike is maybe mostly who he was, but I’m comparing him with forty-year-old memories. After that ... um, so...”

I stopped and shook my head.

“What?” she said.

“See ... this is where I bop myself on the head for being a bit of a solipsist, right after I specifically told you not to be. Well, more or less.”

She giggled. “Well, that’s an interesting thing to say.”

“I mean it. Angie and I have this thing — I made up the name — called Ultimate Time-Traveler Solipsist Impostor Syndrome.”

“I know what all of the words mean. Even some of the phrases.”

“It’s like this. Something happens. It can be nearly anything, as long as it’s around us. Tom starts a Student Council push that never happened in my universe and — we think — not in Angie’s. Lizzie goes from outcast to surprisingly popular. So on, and so forth. The solipsist time-traveler part is that we tend to think we changed something that made this happen, because we know what happened before, and we’re different. But that’s nonsense, on one level. Both of us were oblivious to a lot of people and events at Memorial in our first lives, plus it’s been a long time — forty years for me, seventeen for her, give or take a bit. Long enough to forget a lot of high school.”

She nodded. “With you so far. Of course, you’d think you triggered it, and a lot of it you probably did.”

“That’s the thing, though. We can’t know. Calvin’s a better basketball player. Maybe the matchmaking with Megan is the difference, or maybe it’s that he’s taller, which I think he is. No way to prove it, though. Or maybe it’s just that this Calvin inherited more of his dad’s skills. Or, take Lizzie. Maybe this Lizzie was always going to power through and make Memorial recognize how great she is, even if she thinks she wasn’t.”

“Impossible to know.”

I nodded, then said, “The Impostor Syndrome part gets tossed in when it’s a beneficial difference, which many are. Most, even. Did we do that? Was it inevitable? Or, since we’re super-unusual — as far as we know — does God, or the Gods, or the Universe, or whatever love us, and is ... whatever ... moving things around to make life great for us?”

“Duh. Of course! I see that. You can never tell, but you actually have a viable reason why the universe might specifically want you and Angie to succeed.”

“I don’t like any of it, and I’m really trying to just live my life in this world, but I guarantee that, if something big goes wrong, we’re going to agonize over whether we broke it. But we’ll have no idea if it’s even gone wrong or if it was always going to end up that way in this universe. Maybe we’re just spitting into a hurricane and thinking we’re changing its course.”

She giggled, then said, “That’s a very colorful metaphor. I like it! I need to save that one. It sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would be useful.”

“As far as I know right now, it’s original to me. One thing about talking about this — once I know that someone knows, I’m slightly less guarded about words and phrases that are ... anachronistic.”

Our food arrived, so we both busied ourselves with that for a bit. After a little while, when we’d both eaten a bit, she said, “When you said ‘anachronistic,’ you meant not yet in use, instead of the usual meaning.”

“Yeah. Fortunately, the word itself seems flexible enough to accommodate things from the future. English is extremely not well designed for discussing this. I mean, of course it’s not. But it’s really odd to say something like ‘Of course, I remember when the movie “Heathers” came out, back in 1988, and I’m really looking forward to seeing it again on opening day when it comes out in 1988.’”