Chapter 7

I went with Mom and Dad to pick up Tracy at the airport on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. For any of you who have ever been to a large metropolitan area's air terminal on such a date you can appreciate the chaos that results from having five times as many people in the building as the fire code probably allows. It was wall-to-wall people pushing from one place to the next, all of them dressed in winter clothing since an early snowstorm had decided to descend upon our fair city. The noise and the crowding were suffocating and Tracy's plane arrived nearly thirty minutes late.

But when we saw her walking out of the skyway towards us it made it all worthwhile. Unlike Mom and Dad, I had not realized how much I'd missed my sister until I saw her. Being younger I beat them to her and got the first hug of greeting.

Before Mom and Dad could reach us Tracy whispered in my ear, "You promised me a talk."

"Soon," I told her. "Soon."

It was nearly eleven o'clock before we got home that night and all of us went straight to bed. There would be no talk that night. The next day relatives began to pour in from other parts of Spokane and from as far away as Sandpoint, Idaho and Moses Lake in the southern part of Washington. Mom made a huge turkey dinner that we all demolished and Tracy and I took our turns in the barrel having our cheeks pinched and being told how much we'd grown. By the time all of the relatives cleared out it was nine o'clock and we were all exhausted once more.

Mom and Dad had a long-standing tradition that they shared with another couple, the male half of which was a private pilot. Each day-after-Thanksgiving they would pile into a rented airplane and fly to Seattle to have lunch at the space needle. It was an annual event they'd participated in for as long as I could remember. They'd even continued to do it in my previous life after Tracy's death. They'd offered, halfheartedly I might add, to cancel it this year since Tracy only had a few days with us before she returned to Berkeley, but both Tracy and myself insisted they go.

"Bill and I can find something to do," Tracy told them, looking sharply at me.

"Yeah," I agreed. "We'll keep ourselves busy."

So it came to pass that Mom and Dad piled into their car at eight o'clock on Friday morning for the trip to the small municipal airport from which they would depart. Experience had taught both my sister and I that they would not return until at least six o'clock that evening.

Their car couldn't have been more than a mile from our suburban house before Tracy got off the couch and headed up to her old room. I gave her a puzzled look that grew more puzzled when she returned carrying a twelve pack of beer in her hands.

"Okay," she told me, slapping the beer down on the coffee table, "I scored us a twelver of this imported shit back in California and brought it all the way here for this talk." She ripped open the package, which was green and contained a brand of beer I'd never heard of. She pulled out two bottles and popped the tops with a bottle opener.

"Tracy, it's only eight in the morning," I protested. "I haven't even had breakfast yet."

She smiled. "Little brother," she said, "if you want to be successful when you go to college you'd better learn to drink beer first thing in the morning. It's a requirement." She handed one to me.

I took it, surprised to find it was icy cold.

"Something else you learn in college," she told me, taking a huge swallow. "If you want to keep your beer cold in the absence of a refrigerator, store it outside in the cold. I put this on the roof outside my window last night. Thank God it didn't get below freezing."

I took a swallow, finding the beer very tasty despite the early hour. "Not bad," I told her, drinking some more.

"Okay," she said. "Enough preliminaries. Let's talk."

I set my bottle down on the coffee table, struck by the strangeness of drinking a beer while still dressed in the clothes I'd slept in, my baggy sweats and a T-shirt. Tracy too was still dressed in her customary long T-shirt, this one with the University's logo on the front. Her legs were crossed Indian style on the couch, her eyes looking expectantly at me. I still had no idea what I was going to tell her, how much I should tell her.

"Why don't we start," I told her, "with what you do know and what you think is going on here. Tell me that."

"Why do you want to hear that?" she asked.

"I just want to see how this whole thing looks to someone close to me."

She thought for a second and then nodded, taking another sip of beer. "Fair enough," she said. "Here's what I know. I know that the day you told me about the accident I was scheduled to be in the first time, your personality underwent a radical change. One day you were immature little Billy, the next day you were hugging on me, telling me you loved me, and you weren't sure of the exact date. You got into a fight with a huge bully at school, something completely out of character for you, and you put him in the hospital. You came home that day and caught us smoking pot in the living room and you reamed us for it, the same way an adult would, but also different somehow. You also made Cindy's asshole boyfriend back down, and let me tell you, he doesn't back down too often.

"So I'm forced to conclude that whatever happened to you, happened on that day. Am I right?"

I nodded. "Yes. That was the first day."

"That night you came to my room and told me that creepy-ass story about the car accident. You gave me exact details, exact, about what would happen, who would be in the car, etc. You told me things you had absolutely no right knowing and they turned out to be true.

"About the same time you completely lost all of your shyness. One day I was wondering if my little brother was ever going to get himself laid and the next day you're suddenly a male slut, bagging everything left and right and apparently, if my information was correct, doing a very good job of it.

"You also developed a sudden interest in the stock market and in finding a job. Your grades improved overnight. And I even heard that you put a few teachers in their places."

"Okay," I said, surprised at the amount of information Tracy possessed. Again I was forced to wonder just how much my parents knew or suspected. "So tell me, what do you think all of this means?"

"Well obviously something very strange happened to you on that first day," she offered.

"Such as?"

"I think you had some sort of well, psychic flash. I think you had some sort of Scrooge type experience while you slept that night. Something that showed you what the future was going to be like and was realistic enough that you were unable to simply discount it as a dream. That doesn't explain everything of course, but I think that's something like what happened to you. I don't know how such a thing is possible, or why you were chosen to have this knowledge, but somehow, you were shown the future, including my death, and you were able to stop certain things and start others. Am I close?"

"Kind of," I said, taking another sip, surprised to find that the bottle was now empty. I leaned forward and grabbed another one, opening it up with the bottle opener. "You are somewhat on track here but the truth is actually a little stranger than that."

"So what is the truth?" she asked, grabbing a fresh beer of her own. "Like I said before, Bill, I think I have a right to this information."

"And you do, Tracy," I agreed. "You really do and I think that maybe with both of our minds working on some of the problems that have cropped up here, maybe something can be done. But there is one thing."

"What's that?"

"If I tell you what I know, what happened to me, you can never tell anyone else. Never. If you were to do that and word about what happened got to the wrong people the consequences could be disastrous. Mostly for me, but also for our family. There are people in the world who would literally kill in order to possess the information I have. Do you understand that?"

"Yes," she said softly. "I won't tell anyone anything. You did see the future, didn't you? You do know things that are going to happen, don't you?"

"Tracy," I said, "I didn't just see the future. I lived through it."

She looked at me confused. "You mean when you had your dream or whatever it was like you'd lived through the future? Like you lived through the years while you were asleep?"

"No." I shook my head. "Like I said, it's even stranger than that. I literally lived through the future in somewhat of an alternate timeline. I'm sitting here before you looking like a sixteen going on seventeen-year-old kid. But that's not what I am, Tracy. I've actually lived almost 34 years now."

She took a moment to digest that, staring at me the whole while. "I'm not sure I'm following you, Bill," she finally said.

"Okay," I started. "You've acknowledged the fact that I know aspects of the future, right?"

"Yes, but..."

"The day I woke up with these startling changes. Think back to that day, Tracy. Do you remember how confused I seemed, how glad I was to see you, how I didn't know what day it was? And then later in the day, at school, I had to ask you what my class schedule was? Do you remember all of that?"

"Yes," she said, her eyes widening.

I took another sip. "The reason I was so confused and so glad to see you was that, from my perspective, I'd gone to bed the night before as a 32 year old man in the year 1999."

"1999?" she said, with disbelief.

"In the year 1999 I was a paramedic working for a private ambulance company. My sister Tracy had been killed on her graduation night and was sixteen years in her grave. My parents, after Tracy's death, had become victim's rights advocates. My friend Mike was a total loser, still living with his parents. That was my life when I went to bed that night. When I woke up the next morning, I was fifteen years old again, back in my parent's house, my sister still with the accident in her future, and I had all of my memories from my previous life still intact."

"That's unbelievable, Bill," she told me. "You're saying that you lived until 1999 and then were suddenly put back in 1982?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying," I affirmed. "That's what happened to me. The reason I told you about the accident that night was because, at the time, I wasn't sure if I was suddenly going to wake up back in 1999 the first time I went to sleep. I needed to try to prevent your death if that was the case. And though I did not go back to 1999 the next day, my little speech to you that night was apparently effective. Without any further interference from me you strayed off of the path that would have ended with you dumping into the Spokane River."

She shook her head in denial. "I'm not sure I can believe this," she told me. "You are saying that you lived until 1999? That you went day by day through this life and then suddenly you were put back in 1982? That's not possible."

"I wouldn't have thought so either," I answered. "What we're talking about here is time travel. And though the possibility exists that I simply dreamed this entire life that night, I don't believe that is the case. Too many things have come true. My memories of that previous life are too detailed, too complete. That is what happened, Tracy. I am nearly 34 years old and I lived seventeen of those years in an alternate life."

She took a huge drink of her beer, finishing half the bottle at a swallow. She then picked up another one. "This is way trippy," she told me. "If you lived until 1999, tell me who the Presidents will be."

I saw this as an interrogation technique to see if I was lying. She would be looking for any hesitation in my answer.

"Reagan won again this year," I said. "You already know that."

"It didn't take a psychic to figure that out," she said cynically.

"True," I allowed. "He'll serve out his term but the last year of it will be taken up by a scandal in which he gets caught selling arms to Iran in order to get hostages released and to fund rebels in Nicaragua after congress cut off aid to them. George Bush will be elected after Reagan. He'll gain immense popularity because of the way he handles an invasion of Panama early in his term and a war in the Persian Gulf at mid-term."

"A war in the Persian Gulf?" she asked.

"Iraq will invade Kuwait, a small country nobody has even heard of at this point in history but that supplies a good chunk of oil. Eventually American forces will bomb the living shit out of Iraq and then ground forces will go in and occupy the country. We'll lose less than two hundred people in the entire war and the country will love old George for it. For a while. Unfortunately for him he'll fuck up the economy so bad that even the success of the Gulf War won't get him re-elected. In 1992 Bill Clinton will win the presidency."

"Who the hell is Bill Clinton?" she asked, staring at me.

"Right now I believe he is the governor of Arkansas. He'll do a fairly good job of getting the economy back in shape, in fact he'll succeed in balancing the budget, but he'll also be mired down in sexual scandals his entire run. Apparently Bill has a little trouble keeping his dick in his pants and the Republicans will jump all over that. Despite this he'll be elected to a second term. When I was recycled back to 1982 he was still serving it although the Republicans had managed to impeach him because he got caught lying about getting a blow-job from an intern in his office."

"They impeached him because he got a blowjob?" she asked in disbelief.

"Well, what the charges actually amounted to was lying under oath. But yeah, it was because he got a blowjob. The House impeached him because there was a Republican majority but the Senate cleared him because, although they had a Republican majority also, it wasn't enough to add up to a two-thirds vote." I shook my head sadly. "I can sympathize with old Bill, let me tell you. You think you're having a casual little encounter with someone but it can sure come back to bite your ass."

"Wow," Tracy whispered. "You're telling the truth. You could not have made up all of those details off the top of your head."

"No," I said. "I couldn't."

She took another drink of beer. "But why did such a thing happen to you, Bill?" she asked. "Why were you picked to do this? Are there others?"

"This is how it happened," I said. "Like I told you, I was a paramedic. On the day before I came back I went to a call at a convalescent facility in North Spokane. My patient was an old Chinese man with cancer. He was dying fast. So I..." I told her the complete story. It took about twenty minutes. She listened with rapt attention throughout it.

"So you think he granted you a wish?" she asked when I was done.

"It would seem so," I told her. "The next morning I found myself back in 1982. Fifteen again, just like I'd asked, all memories intact, just like I'd asked. I don't know how he did it, but he did."

"Wow," she said.

"Do you believe me?" I asked her.

She looked up at me. "I don't want to," she said. "It's scary as hell to think that what you're saying is true. It changes my entire perspective on what's real and what's not, on what's possible and what's not."

"Uh huh," I agreed whole-heartedly.

"But all the same," she continued, "I am forced to believe what you say is true. When you explain it everything adds up. It's the only answer that makes sense."

"Yep," I agreed.

Tracy suddenly glared at me. "So here you are, a thirty-something year old man trapped in a child's body. And what have you been doing? You've been screwing sixteen and seventeen year olds! You're a fuckin' pervert, Bill."

"I agree," I told her.

"You do?" she asked.

"I'll be the first to admit that I made some poor decisions when I was given this gift. Yes, I had sex with high school girls, something I probably shouldn't have done. I abused a power that was given to me for my own pleasure, not just once but multiple times. I would like to say, in my own defense, that although my mind is that of a 32 year old, my body is a teenager's, through and through. I have testosterone surging through me like mad. I thought I was horny as a 32 year old but I hadn't seen anything. We forget what it's like to be in the middle of adolescence, let me tell you. That's not a very good excuse I know, but it's all I have to offer. I never once tried to screw an underage girl when I was an adult. Not a single time. But suddenly I found myself able to do it legally and with my body crying out for it. I didn't put up much of a fight but I couldn't help it."

"Are you saying that you are not doing that anymore?" she asked.

"I'm trying not to," I said. "It's cost me a lot. I told you that Nina and I were no longer talking to each other."

"You did. I figured it had something to do with your extracurricular activities. I tried to tell you once that she loved you. And I was pretty sure that you loved her too. You didn't listen."

"I know. And you were right on both counts," I said. "Unfortunately I waited too long to realize it. I screwed around until Nina had her eyes opened to what I was like. She basically told me to fuck off and stay away from her. She won't even talk to me now."

"I'm sorry," Tracy said honestly. "I like Nina. I thought you two were perfect together. I still think that even though I now know you're actually seventeen years older than she is. Maybe she'll come around."

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe not. In any case, Nina is part of why I called you at the bookstore with that warning. Nina and Mike and some other things have made me realize that fate has a pattern to it. A pattern that it keeps trying to put things and people into. You are part of what has fallen out of pattern."

"Because I didn't die on graduation night?" she asked slowly.

"Exactly," I said. "In a way I'm glad that these other things have happened. They allowed me to see what was going on, that fate was attempting to re-align things. When I saw that, I was able to give you that second warning and you were able to heed it when fate took a second shot at you."

She shuddered. "I still get the creeps when I think about how close I was to getting in that car with Darren that night. Jesus. What other things have you seen as far as these patterns go? Maybe if I know how strong this thing is..."

"Okay," I said. "There's you first of all. As you know, in my previous life you died on graduation night. In this life I prevented that. But I also knew Nina in my previous life, in school of course but also years later, and that Nina was not a pleasant person at all."

"What do you mean?" Tracy asked.

"In my first life Nina was a doctor in one of the emergency rooms. And she was a total bitch. She was the shining example of a major inferiority complex. If anybody did anything good in front of her, she would find a way to criticize it. If anyone did anything wrong, she would jump down their throats. She was a miserable person and it was quite plain to me why she was a miserable person."

"Because of the way she was treated in school," Tracy said.

I looked at her, smiling. "You know, Tracy, you're pretty smart for a youngster."

She giggled nervously. "This is so weird," she commented. "Trying to adjust myself from thinking about you as my little brother. You've got seventeen years on me now."

I snorted. "Older doesn't necessarily mean wiser. Believe me. Anyway, when I came back I decided to eat in the cafeteria one day and I saw Nina sitting in there alone. That brought back memories of how bitchy she was as a doctor and led to the speculation as to its cause. So I, thinking I was the great superhero, the fixer of oppressed people everywhere, decided to befriend her and maybe change her personality a little."

"And she fell in love with you," Tracy said.

I nodded. "Yes. At first everything looked rosy. Nina came out of her shell, she started to socialize with people, and she lost a lot of her shyness. I figured that there was no way she could turn into a bitch after all of that. But I was wrong. She finally caught me with a girl and that opened her eyes to what I was like. The next school day, the very next one, she was back in the cafeteria, eating alone, being uncommunicative, being the Nina she'd been before I came along. I have no doubt in my mind that if things continue the way they are going, she's going to end up a bitchy doctor married to a prick neurosurgeon, making life miserable for everyone around her but especially for herself. Though the catalyst for this was of my making I was frightened to the core by the absurd ease with which she slipped right back into the pattern."

"But, Bill," Tracy protested, "it's only natural that she would react that way after catching you with another girl. As a fellow girl I can understand exactly how she would feel when the guy she loves turns out to be a..."

"An asshole?" I suggested.

"Well, yeah," she said. "But anyway, just because of that, you can't decide that fate is trying to realign itself."

"You're right, Tracy," I said. "But that's not the only thing."

I told her about Beirut and the bombing and, most importantly, of the 240 casualties in both timelines. I told her about Mike and about his fate in the previous timeline and what had happened to him in this one; how he kept trying to slip back into his pattern.

"He was smoking pot at the fire station?" she asked, seeing instantly the ramifications of that.

"Yes." I nodded. "Marijuana. The same thing that destroyed his career in my first life tried to destroy it in this one. The coincidence of that struck me as a little bit more than coincidental."

"Jesus," she said, shaking her head. "This is scary, Bill."

"I know," I told her. "But there's hope I think. Quite a bit of it."

"What do you mean?"

"First of all, when Mike got busted with the pot and the counselor signed him up for independent study once more, I went and saw the counselor."

"You did?"

"I intervened on Mike's part by talking plainly to the counselor, talking as one adult to another, something I don't like to do too much these days since it makes me feel kind of exposed. But anyway, she listened to me. She got Mike his position back at ROP and at this moment he's back in the running. I was able to pull him back out of his pattern again after he drifted back into it. Now it remains to be seen whether or not he'll go back into his old ways. I certainly can not discount that possibility, but it looks to me like he might have learned his lesson, that he might be all right."

"That was nice of you, Bill," Tracy said. "Do you really think he'll turn out okay?"

"I hope so," I said. "I've done all I can do for him and I can only hope that fate or his own personality doesn't fuck him again. It's pretty much up to him." I took a deep breath. "But there's another reason why I think fate can be thwarted."

"What's that?" she asked.

I looked up at the ceiling for a second and sighed. So far Tracy had taken all I'd said remarkably well and had been reasonably non-judgmental. But I didn't know how she was going to react to this one.

"Anita," I said softly.

Tracy looked at me puzzled. "Anita? What does she have to do with anything?"

I swallowed nervously. "In my previous life Anita met a man shortly before your graduation. By the time I left for college she had married him and moved away. She hasn't done that in this reality, or at least she hasn't begun that relationship."

"I don't understand," Tracy said. "Why hasn't she?"

"Because of me," I said.

"You?" Tracy asked. "What do you..." She stopped suddenly, staring at me in horror. "Oh my God," she whispered. "You haven't been... sleeping with Anita have you?"

I nodded shamefully.

"Anita?" Tracy repeated in disbelief. "You've been fucking Anita? Our neighbor?"

"Yes."

"Jesus, Bill," she said, shaking her head. "You are depraved. Anita? I can't believe this. I simply cannot believe it. The high school chicks are bad enough, but Anita?"

I shrugged. "It seemed like a harmless thing at the time."

"No wonder you used to spend so much time over there. Christ! How long were you doing her?"

"Do you remember the night that I offered to talk her into letting me babysit her kids instead of you?" I asked.

Her eyes widened. "Yeah."

"That was the first time. I went over to her house later that night and I seduced her. Well actually I led her to believe that she was seducing me. She had a little thing for teenaged boys you see, something I didn't realize my first trip through but that I'd realized as an adult. I took advantage of the situation."

"God," Tracy muttered.

"After that it became an ongoing thing. I never realized I was doing any harm. I just thought I was having fun."

"Fun?" Tracy asked. "With Anita? That's fuckin' gross!"

"Not really," I said. "She's quite good in bed. In fact, of all the sex I had in both of my lives, I have to say that she is physically the best at it."

"I'd rather not hear about that," Tracy said, making a sour face. "Are you still doing her?"

"No," I said. "I came to some hard realizations over the past month. One of them was that Anita had deviated off her path and thought she was in love with me. She did not go out with the man she was supposed to marry when he asked her the first time because she thought she was in a long-term relationship with me."

"Christ," Tracy commented. "You really do know how to fuck up people's lives, don't you?"

"I offer no excuses except selfishness and stupidity," I said. "It seems I figured that since I was a teenager there were no consequences to sexual relationships like there are when you're an adult. I was wrong. Very wrong. As soon as I realized all of this I broke off the relationship with Anita, hoping that would put her back on the path she was supposed to be on. After all, Mike, Beirut, Nina, and now you, all of you tried hard to resume your previous pattern. Why not Anita?"

"But she hasn't?"

I shook my head. "No," I said. "She hasn't. In fact she's getting out of control now. She keeps calling the house and asking Mom if I can come over to do some chore for her. And I keep making excuses why I can't. It's already plain that Mom has some suspicions. I don't know how much longer she's going to be able to keep ignoring them. In truth, I don't know what to do about Anita but I've got to do something.

"But the point of this whole Anita discussion was to make you feel better. You see, Anita is living proof that you can deviate from your path. If Anita can do it, then so can you."

Tracy finished off the last of her current beer. She immediately reached in and pulled out two more. She opened them up and handed one to me. I took it even though I still had a quarter of a bottle in my hand.

"I must say," Tracy told me, "that what you said today does make me feel better."

"It does?"

She nodded. "Fate," she said, "is trying to get me. That's true and that's something I'm going to have to accept. But if I'm to believe you then I'm already supposed to be dead, twice now. I'm living on borrowed time anyway. I'm inclined to believe that, like you said on the phone to me, certain pre-conditions need to be met for that fate to come true. It seems that if I avoid putting myself into the situation of a drunk driver and a car, than maybe, just maybe, I'll be safe. Did you ever take a philosophy class when you were in college, you know, before?"

"Yes I did," I told her. "Philosophy 1A. A general education elective."

"I'm taking it now," she told me. "I like it. They go into a lot of the stuff that I think about when I get stoned. One of those things is the nature of fate and the consequences of meddling with it."

"Really?" I said, interested. If they'd explained that in my philosophy class nearly fifteen years in my past, I certainly didn't remember it now.

"One of the things they talk about is the ramifications of changing fate. As you've pointed out, fate will try to re-align itself if you do that. The question is whether the re-alignment effort will be nodal or cascading."

"Nodal or cascading?"

"Yes," she said. "I'm hoping we're not dealing with cascading here. In cascading you would have started to stress the system starting on the night that I did not get into that car. That would be graduation night. If that is the case then my continued existence will begin to build up that stress until it is almost inevitable that a corrective action will occur. In other words, my continuing to live will be unacceptable to fate and it will not stop until it gets me, one way or the other. If that is what we're dealing with, than I might as well make out my will. I could lock myself in my room forever and still I would die."

"That's pretty depressing," I said softly.