Counting Up, Counting Down Read online

  He put the computer in his backpack again. He picked up the suitcases and walked to the men’s-room door. He set down a case so he could open the door. His heart pounded harder than ever. Yes? Or no?

  Justin took two steps down the hall toward the stairs before he whispered, “Yes!” Instead of the gray-green carpet he’d walked in on, this stuff was an ugly mustard yellow. He had no proof he was in 1999, not yet. But he wasn’t in Kansas any more.

  The place had the quiet-before-the-storm feeling offices get waiting for people to show up for work. That fit Justin’s calculations. The air conditioner was noisier, wheezier, than the system that had been—would be—in his time. But it kept the corridor noticeably cooler than it had been when he lugged his stuff into the men’s room. The ’90s had ridden an oil glut. They burned lavishly to beat summer heat. His time couldn’t.

  There was the doorway that led to the stairs. Down he went. The walls were different: industrial yellow, not battleship gray. When he got to the little lobby, he didn’t recognize the furniture. What was there seemed no better or worse than what he was used to, but it was different.

  If there was a guard, he was off making his rounds. Justin didn’t wait for him. He opened the door. He wondered if that would touch off the alarm, but it didn’t. He stepped out into the cool, fresh early morning air of . . . when?

  He walked through the empty lot to the sidewalk, then looked around. Across the street, a woman out power-walking glanced his way, but didn’t stop. She wore a cap, a T-shirt, and baggy shorts, which proved nothing. But then he looked at the parked cars, and began to grin a crazy grin. Most of them had smooth jelly-bean lines, which, to his eyes, was two style changes out of date. If this wasn’t 1999, it was damn close.

  With a clanking rumble of iron, a MetroLink train pulled into the little station behind his office. A couple of people got off; a handful got on. In his day, with gas ever scarcer, ever costlier, that commuter train would have far more passengers.

  Standing on the sidewalk, unnoticed by the world around him, he pumped a fist in the air. “I did it!” he said. “I really did it!”

  Having done it, he couldn’t do anything else, not for a little while. Not much was open at half past five. But there was a Denny’s up the street. Suitcases in hand, he trudged toward it. The young, bored-looking Hispanic waitress who seated him gave him a fishy stare. “You coulda left your stuff in the car,” she said pointedly.

  His answer was automatic: “I don’t have a car.” Her eyebrows flew upward. If you didn’t have a car in L.A., you were nobody. If you didn’t have a car and did have suitcases, you were liable to be a dangerously weird nobody. He had to say something. Inspiration struck: “I just got off the train. Somebody should’ve picked me up, but he blew it. Toast and coffee, please?”

  She relaxed. “Okay—coming up. White, rye, or whole wheat?”

  “Wheat.” Justin looked around. He was the only customer in the place. “Can you keep an eye on the cases for a second? I want to buy a Times.” He’d seen the machine out front, but hadn’t wanted to stop till he got inside. When the waitress nodded, he got a paper. It was only a quarter. That boggled him; he paid two bucks weekdays, five Sundays.

  But the date boggled him more. June 22, 1999. Right on the money. He went back inside. The coffee waited for him, steaming gently. The toast came up a moment later. As he spread grape jam over it, he glanced at the Times and wondered what his younger self was doing now.

  Sleeping, you dummy. He’d liked to sleep late when he was twenty-one, and finals at Cal State Northridge would have just ended. He’d have the CompUSA job to go to, but the place didn’t open till ten.

  Megan would be sleeping, too. He thought of her lying in a T-shirt and sweats at her parents’ house, wiggling around the way she did in bed. Maybe she was dreaming of him and smiling. She would be smiling now. A few years from now . . . Well, he’d come to fix that.

  He killed forty-five minutes. By then, the restaurant was filling up. The waitress started to look ticked. Justin ordered bacon and eggs and hash browns. They bought him the table for another hour. He tried not to think about what the food was doing to his coronary arteries. His younger self wouldn’t have cared. His younger self loved Denny’s. My younger self was a fool, he thought.

  He paid, again marveling at how little things cost. Of course, people didn’t make much, either; you could live well on $100,000 a year. He tried to imagine living on $100,000 in 2018, and shook his head. You couldn’t do it, not if you felt like eating, too.

  When he went out to the parking lot, he stood there for forty minutes, looking back toward the train station. By then, it was getting close to eight o’clock. Up a side street from the Denny’s was a block of apartment buildings with names like the Tivoli, the Gardens, and the Yachtsman. Up the block he trudged. The Yachtsman had a vacancy sign.

  The manager looked grumpy at getting buzzed so early, but the sight of greenbacks cheered him up in a hurry. He rented Justin a one-bedroom furnished apartment at a ridiculously low rate. “I’m here on business,” Justin said, which was true . . . in a way. “I’ll pay three months in advance if you fix me up with a TV and a stereo. They don’t have to be great. They just have to work.”

  “I’d have to root around,” the manager said. “It’d be kind of a pain.” He waited. Justin passed him two fifties. He nodded. So did Justin. This was business, too. The manager eyed his suitcases. “You’ll want to move in right away, won’t you?”

  Justin nodded again. “And I’ll want to use your phone to set up my phone service.”

  “Okay,” the manager said with a sigh. “Come into my place here. I’ll get things set up.” His fish-faced wife watched Justin with wide, pale, unblinking eyes while he called the phone company and made arrangements. The manager headed off with a vacuum cleaner. In due course, he came back. “You’re ready. TV and stereo are in there.”

  “Thanks.” Justin went upstairs to the apartment. It was small and bare, with furniture that had seen better decades. The TV wasn’t new. The stereo was so old, it didn’t play CDs, only records and cassettes. Well, his computer could manage CDs. He accepted a key to the apartment and another for the security gates, then unpacked. He couldn’t do everything he wanted till he got a phone, but he was here.

  He used a pay phone to call a cab, and rode over to a used-car lot. He couldn’t do everything he wanted without wheels, either. He had no trouble proving he was himself; he’d done some computer forgery before he left to make his driver’s license expire in 2003, as it really did. His number hadn’t changed. Security holograms that would have given a home machine trouble here-and-now were a piece of cake to graphics programs from 2018. His younger self didn’t know he’d just bought a new old car: a gray early-’90s Toyota much like the one he was already driving.

  “Insurance is mandatory,” the salesman said. “I can sell you a policy . . .” Justin let him do it, to his barely concealed delight. It was, no doubt, highway robbery, especially since Justin was nominally only twenty-one. He’d dressed for the age he affected, in T-shirt and jeans. To him, though, no 1999 prices seemed expensive. He paid cash and took the car.

  Getting a bank account wasn’t hard, either. He chose a bank his younger self didn’t use. Research paid off: he deposited only $9,000. Ten grand or more in cash and the bank would have reported the transaction to the government. He didn’t want that kind of notice. He wanted no notice at all. The assistant manager handed him a book of temporary checks. “Good to have your business, Mr. Kloster. The personalized ones will be ready in about a week.”

  “Okay.” Justin went off to buy groceries. He wasn’t a great cook, but he was a lot better than his younger self. He’d had to learn, and had.

  Once the groceries were stowed in the pantry and the refrigerator, he left again, this time to a bookstore. He went to the computer section first, to remind himself of the state of the art. After a couple of minutes, he was smiling and shaking his head. Had he done
serious work with this junk? He supposed he had, but he was damned if he saw how. Before he was born, people had used slide rules because there weren’t any computers yet, or even calculators. He was damned if he saw how they’d done any work, either.

  But the books didn’t have exactly what he wanted. He went to the magazine rack. There was a MacAddict in a clear plastic envelope. The CD-ROM that came with the magazine would let him start an account on a couple of online services. Once he had one, he could e-mail his younger self, and then he’d be in business.

  If I—or I-then—don’t flip out altogether, he thought. Things might get pretty crazy. Now that he was here and on the point of getting started, he felt in his belly how crazy they might get. And he knew both sides of things. His younger self didn’t.

  Would Justin-then even listen to him? He had to hope so. Looking back, he’d been pretty stupid when he was twenty-one. No matter how stupid he’d been, though, he’d have to pay attention when he got his nose rubbed in the facts. Wouldn’t he?

  Justin bought the MacAddict and took it back to his apartment. As soon as he got online, he’d be ready to roll.

  He chose AOL, not Earthlink. His younger self was on Earthlink, and looked down his nose at AOL. And AOL let him pay by debiting his checking account. He didn’t have any credit cards that worked in 1999. He supposed he could get one, but it would take time. He’d taken too much time already. He thought he had about three months before the space-time string he’d manipulated would snap him back to 2018. With luck, with skill, with what he knew then that he hadn’t known now, he’d be happier there. But he had no time to waste.

  His computer, throttled down to 56K access to the outside world, might have thought the same. But AOL’s local access lines wouldn’t support anything faster. “Welcome,” the electronic voice said as he logged on. He ignored it, and went straight to e-mail. He was pretty sure he remembered his old e-mail address. If I don’t, he thought, chuckling a little as he typed, whoever is using this address right now will get awfully confused.

  He’d pondered what he would say to get his younger self’s attention, and settled on the most provocative message he could think of. He wrote, Who but you would know that the first time you jacked off, you were looking at Miss March 1993, a little before your fifteenth birthday? Nobody, right? Gorgeous blonde, wasn’t she? The only way I know that is that I am you, more or less. Let me hear from you. He signed it, Justin Kloster, age 40, and sent it.

  Then he had to pause. His younger self would be working now, but he’d check his e-mail as soon as he got home. Justin remembered religiously doing that every day. He didn’t remember getting e-mail like the message he’d just sent, of course, but that was the point of this exercise.

  Waiting till half past five wasn’t easy. He wished he could use his time-travel algorithm to fast-forward to late afternoon, but he didn’t dare. Too many superstrings might tangle, and even the office machine up in 2018 hadn’t been able to work out the ramifications of that. In another ten years, it would probably be child’s play for a computer, but he wouldn’t be able to pretend he was twenty-one when he was fifty. Even a baby face and pale gold hair wouldn’t stretch that far. He hoped they’d stretch far enough now.

  At 5:31, he logged on to AOL again. “Welcome!” the voice told him, and then, “You’ve got mail!”

  “You’ve got spam,” he muttered under his breath. And one of the messages in his mailbox was spam. He deleted it without a qualm. The other one, though, was from his younger self @earthlink.net.

  Heart pounding, he opened the e-mail. What kind of stupid joke is this? his younger self wrote. Whatever it is, it’s not funny.

  Justin sighed. He supposed he shouldn’t have expected himself-at-twenty-one to be convinced right away. This business was hard to believe, even for him. But he had more shots in his gun than one. No joke, he wrote back. Who else but you would know you lost your first baby tooth in a pear at school when you were in the first grade? Who would know your dad fed you Rollos when he took you to work with him that day you were eight or nine? Who would know you spent most of the time while you were losing your cherry staring at the mole on the side of Lindsey Fletcher’s neck? Me, that’s who: you at 40. He typed his name and sent the message.

  His stomach growled, but he didn’t go off and make supper. He sat by the computer, waiting. His younger self would still be online. He’d have to answer . . . wouldn’t he? Justin hadn’t figured out what he’d do if himself-at-twenty-one wanted nothing to do with him. The prospect had never crossed his mind. Maybe it should have.

  “Don’t be stupid, kid,” he said softly. “Don’t complicate things for me. Don’t complicate things for yourself, either.”

  He sat. He waited. He worried. After what seemed forever but was less than ten minutes, the AOL program announced, “You’ve got mail!”

  He read it. I don’t watch X-Files much, his younger self wrote, but maybe I ought to. How could you know all that about me? I never told anybody about Lindsey Fletcher’s neck.

  So far as Justin could recall, he hadn’t told anyone about her neck by 2018, either. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten. He wouldn’t forget till they shoveled dirt over him.

  How do I know? he wrote. I’ve told you twice now—I know because I am you, you in 2018. It’s not X-Files stuff—it’s good programming. The show still ran in endless syndication, but he hadn’t watched it for years. He went on, Believe me, I’m back here for a good reason, and sent the e-mail.

  Again, he waited. Again, the reply came back fast. He imagined his younger self eyeing the screen of his computer, eyeing it and scratching his head. His younger self must have been scratching hard, for what came back was, But that’s impossible.

  Okay, he typed. It’s impossible. But if it is impossible, how do I know all this stuff about you?

  More waiting. The hell with it, he thought. He’d intended to broil lamb chops, but he would have had to pay attention to keep from cremating them. He took a dinner out of the freezer and threw it into the tiny microwave built in above the stove. He could punch a button and get it more or less right. Back to the computer.

  “You’ve got mail!” it said once more, and he did. I don’t know, his younger self had written. How do you know all this stuff about me?

  Because it’s stuff about me, too, he answered. You don’t seem to be taking that seriously yet.

  The microwave beeped. Justin started to go off to eat, but the PowerBook told him he had more mail. He called it up. If you’re supposed to be me, himself-at-twenty-one wrote, then you’ll look like me, right?

  Justin laughed. His younger self wouldn’t believe that. He’d probably think it would make this pretender shut up and go away. But Justin wasn’t a pretender, and didn’t need to shut up—he could put up instead. Right, he replied. Meet me in front of the B. Dalton’s in the Northridge mall tomorrow night at 6:30 and I’ll buy you dinner. You’ll see for yourself. He sent the message, then did walk away from the computer.

  Eating frozen food reminded him why he’d learned to cook. He chucked the tray in the trash, then returned to the bedroom to see what his younger self had answered. Three words: See you there.

  The mall surprised Justin. In his time, it had seen better years. In 1999, just a little after being rebuilt because of the ’94 earthquake, it still seemed shiny and sparkly and new. Justin got there early. With his hair short, with the Cow Pi T-shirt and jeans and big black boots he was wearing, he fit in with the kids who shopped and strutted and just hung out.

  He found out how well he fit when he eyed an attractive brunette of thirty or so who was wearing business clothes. She caught him doing it, looked horrified for a second, and then stared through him as if he didn’t exist. At first, he thought her reaction was over the top. Then he realized it wasn’t. You may think she’s cute, but she doesn’t think you are. She thinks you’re wet behind the ears.

  Instead of leaving him insulted, the woman’s reaction cheered him. Maybe I ca
n bring this off.

  He leaned against the brushed-aluminum railing in front of the second-level B. Dalton’s as if he had nothing better to do. A gray-haired man in maroon polyester pants muttered something about punk kids as he walked by. Justin grinned, which made the old fart mutter more.

  But then the grin slipped from Justin’s face. What replaced it was probably astonishment. Here came his younger self, heading up from the Sears end of the mall.

  He could tell the moment when his younger self saw him. Himself-at-twenty-one stopped, gaped, and turned pale. He looked as if he wanted to turn around and run away. Instead, after gulping, he kept on.

  Justin’s heart pounded. He hadn’t realized just how strange seeing himself would feel. And he’d been expecting this. For his younger self, it was a bolt from the blue. That meant he had to be the one in control. He stuck out his hand. “Hi,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

  His younger self shook hands with him. They both looked down. The two right hands fit perfectly. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Justin thought. His younger self, still staring, said, “Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe you’re not crazy, either. You look just like me.”

  “Funny how that works,” Justin said. Seeing his younger self wasn’t like looking in a mirror. It wasn’t because himself-at-twenty-one looked that much younger—he didn’t. It wasn’t even because his younger self wasn’t doing the same things he did. After a moment, he figured out what it was: his younger self’s image wasn’t reversed, the way it would have been in a mirror. That made him look different.

  His younger self put hands on hips. “Prove you’re from the future,” he said.

  Justin had expected that. He took a little plastic coin purse, the kind that can hook onto a key chain, out of his pocket and squeezed it open. “Here,” he said. “This is for you.” He handed himself-at-twenty-one a quarter.