Counting Up, Counting Down Read online

  He finally fell asleep about noon. The Instant Love kept him up and bouncing till then. At two-thirty, the phone rang. By the way he jerked and thrashed, a bomb might have gone off by his head. He grabbed the handset, feeling like death. “Hello?” he croaked.

  “Hi. How are things?”

  Not Megan. A man’s voice. For a second, all that meant was that it didn’t matter, that he could hang up on it. Then he recognized it: the voice on his own answering machine. But it wasn’t a recording. It was live, which seemed more than he could say right now. His younger self.

  He had to talk, dammit. “Things are fine,” he said. “Or they were till you called. I was asleep.”

  “Now?” The way himself-at-twenty-one sounded, it might have been some horrible perversion. “I called now ’cause I figured you wouldn’t be.”

  “Never mind,” Justin said. The cobwebs receded. He knew they’d be back pretty soon. “Yeah, things are okay. We went to the Probe last night, and—”

  “Did you?” His younger self sounded—no, suspicious wasn’t right. Jealous. That was it. “What else did you do?”

  “That after-hours place. Some guy came through with flyers, so I knew how to get there.”

  “Lucky you. And what else did you do?” Yeah. Jealous. A-number-one jealous.

  Justin wondered how big a problem that would be. “About what you’d expect,” he answered tightly. “I’m you, remember. What would you have done?”

  The sigh on the other end of the line said his younger self knew exactly what he would have done, and wished he’d been doing it. But I did it better, you little geek.

  Before his younger self could do anything but sigh, Justin added, “And when I took her home, I told her I loved her.”

  “Jesus!” himself-at-twenty-one exclaimed. “What did you go and do that for?”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “That doesn’t mean you’ve got to say it, for Christ’s sake,” his younger self told him. “What am I supposed to do when you go away?”

  “Marry her, doofus,” Justin said. “Live happily ever after, so I get to live happily ever after, too. Why the hell do you think I came back here?”

  “For your good time, man, not mine. I’m sure not having a good time, I’ll tell you.”

  Was I really that stupid? Justin wondered. But it wasn’t quite the right question. Was my event horizon that short? Holding on to patience with both hands, he said, “Look, chill for a while, okay? I’m doing fine.”

  “Sure you are.” His younger self sounded hot. “You’re doing fucking great. What about me?”

  Nope, no event horizon at all. Justin said, “You’re fine. Chill. You’re on vacation. Go ahead. Relax. Spend my money. That’s what it’s there for.”

  That distracted his younger self. “Where’d you get so much? What did you do, rob a bank?”

  “It’s worth a lot more now than it will be then,” Justin answered. “Inflation. Have some fun. Just be discreet, okay?”

  “You mean, keep out of your hair.” His younger self didn’t stay distracted long.

  “In a word, yes.”

  “While you’re in Megan’s hair.” Himself-at-twenty-one let out a long, angry breath. “I don’t know, dude.”

  “It’s for you.” Justin realized he was pleading. “It’s for her and you.”

  Another angry exhalation. “Yeah.” His younger self hung up.

  Everything went fine till he took Megan to the much ballyhooed summer blockbuster two weekends later. She’d been caught up in the hype. And she thought the leading man was cute, though he looked like a boy to Justin. On the other hand, Justin looked like a boy himself, or he couldn’t have got away with this.

  But that wasn’t the worst problem. Unlike her, he’d seen the movie before. He remembered liking it, though he’d thought the plot a little thin. Seen through forty-year-old eyes, it had no plot at all. He had a lot less tolerance for loud soundtracks and things blowing up every eight and a half minutes than his younger self would have. And even the most special special effects seemed routine to somebody who’d been through another twenty years of computer-generated miracles.

  As the credits finally rolled, he thought, No wonder I don’t go to the movies much any more.

  When Megan turned to him, though, her eyes were shining. “Wasn’t that great?” she said as they headed for the exit.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Great.”

  A different tone would have saved him. He realized that as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Too late. The one he’d used couldn’t have been anything but sarcastic. And Megan noticed. She was good at catching things like that—better than he’d ever been, certainly. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you like it?”

  The challenge in her voice reminded Justin of how she’d sounded during the quarrels before their breakup. She couldn’t know that. His younger self wouldn’t have known, either—he hadn’t been through it. But Justin had, and reacted with a challenge of his own: “Why? Because it was really dumb.”

  It was a nice summer night, clear, cooling down from the hot day, a few stars in the sky—with the lights of the San Fernando Valley, you never saw more than a few. None of that mattered to Megan. She stopped halfway to the car. “How can you say that?”

  Justin saw the special-effects stardust in her eyes, and the effect of a great many closeups of the boyishly handsome—pretty, to his newly jaundiced eye—leading man. He should have shut up. But he reacted viscerally to that edge in her voice. Instead of letting things blow over, he told her exactly why the movie was dumb.

  He finished just as they got to the Toyota. He hadn’t let her get in word one. When he ran down, she stared at him. “Why are you so mean? You never sounded so mean before.”

  “You asked. I told you,” he said, still seething. But when he saw her fighting back tears as she fastened her seat belt, he realized he’d hit back too hard. It wasn’t quite like kicking a puppy, but it was close, too close. He had a grown man’s armor, and weapons to pierce a grown woman’s—all the nastier products of experience—and he’d used them on a kid. Too late, he felt like an asshole. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Whatever.” Megan looked out the window toward the theater complex, not at him. “Maybe you’d better take me home.”

  Alarm tore through him. “Honey, I said I was sorry. I meant it.”

  “I heard you.” Megan still wouldn’t look at him. “You’d better take me home anyhow.”

  Sometimes, the more you argued, the bigger the mess you made. This looked like one of those times. Justin recognized that now. A couple of minutes sooner would have been better. “Okay,” he said, and started the car.

  The ride back to her folks’ house was almost entirely silent. When he pulled up, Megan opened the door before the car stopped rolling. “Goodnight,” she said. She started for the front door at something nearly a run.

  “Wait!” he called. If that wasn’t raw panic in his voice, it would do. She heard it, too, and stopped, looking back warily, like a frightened animal that would bolt at any wrong move. He said, “I won’t do that again. Promise.” To show how much he meant it, he crossed his heart. He hadn’t done that since about the third grade.

  Megan’s nod was jerky. “All right,” she said. “But don’t call me for a while anyway. We’ll both chill a little. How does that sound?”

  Terrible. Justin hated the idea of losing any precious time here. But he saw he couldn’t argue. He wished he’d seen that sooner. He made himself nod, made himself smile, made himself say, “Okay.”

  The porch light showed relief on Megan’s face. Relief she wouldn’t be talking to him for a while. He had to live with that all the way home.

  He wished he could have walked away from his younger self’s job at CompUSA, but it would have looked bad. He’d needed a few days to have the details of late-1990s machines come back to him. Once they did, he rapidly got a reputation as a maven. His manager bumped
him a buck an hour—and piled more hours on him. He resisted as best he could, but he couldn’t always.

  Three days after the fight with Megan, his phone rang as he got into his—well, his younger self’s—apartment. He got to it just before the answering machine could. “Hello?” He was panting. If it was himself-at-twenty-one, he was ready to contemplate murder—or would it be suicide?

  But it was Megan. “Hiya,” she said. “Didn’t I ask you not to call for a little bit? I know I did.”

  “Yeah, you did. And I—” Justin broke off. He hadn’t called her. What about his younger self? Maybe I ought to rub him out, if he’s going to mess things up. But that thought vanished. He couldn’t deny a conversation she’d surely had. “I just like talking to you, that’s all.”

  Megan’s laughter was rainbows to his ears. “You were so funny,” she said. “It was like we hadn’t fought at all. I couldn’t stay pissed. Believe me, I tried.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” Justin said. And I do need to have a talk with my younger self. “You want to go out this weekend?”

  “Sure,” Megan answered. “But let’s stay away from the movies. What do you think?”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Okay with me.”

  “Good.” More relief. “Plenty of other things we can do. Maybe I should just come straight to your place.”

  His younger self would have slavered at that. He liked the idea pretty well himself. But, being forty and not twenty-one, he heard what Megan didn’t say, too. What she meant, or some of what she meant, was, You’re fine in bed. Whenever we’re not in bed, whenever we go somewhere, you get weird.

  “Sure,” he said, and then, to prove he wasn’t only interested in her body, he went on, “Let’s go to Sierra’s and stuff ourselves full of tacos and enchiladas. How’s that?”

  “Fine,” Megan said.

  Justin thought it sounded fine, too. Sierra’s was a Valley institution. It had been there since twenty years before he was born, and would still be going strong in 2018. He didn’t go there often then; he had too many memories of coming there with Megan. Now those memories would turn from painful to happy. That was why he was here. Smiling, he said, “See you Saturday, then.”

  “Yeah,” Megan said. Justin’s smile got bigger.

  Ring. Ring. Ring. “Hello?” his younger self said.

  “Oh, good,” Justin said coldly. “You’re home.”

  “Oh. It’s you.” Himself-at-twenty-one didn’t sound delighted to hear from him, either. “No, you’re home. I’m stuck here.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to lay low till I was done here?” Justin demanded. “God damn it, you’d better listen to me. I just had to pretend I knew what Megan was talking about when she said I’d been on the phone with her.”

  “She’s my girl, too,” his younger self said. “She was my girl first, you know. I’ve got a right to talk with her.”

  “Not if you want her to keep being your girl, you don’t,” Justin said. “You’re the one who’s going to screw it up, remember?”

  “That’s what you keep telling me,” his younger self answered. “But you know what? I’m not so sure I believe you any more. When I called her, Megan sounded like she was really torqued at me—at you, I mean. So it doesn’t sound like you’ve got all the answers, either.”

  “Nobody has all the answers,” Justin said with such patience as he could muster. He didn’t think he’d believed that at twenty-one; at forty, he was convinced it was true. He was convinced something else was true, too: “If you think you’ve got more of them than I do, you’re full of shit.”

  “You want to be careful how you talk to me,” himself-at-twenty-one said. “Half the time, I still think your whole setup is bogus. If I decide to, I can wreck it. You know damn well I can.”

  Justin knew only too well. It scared the crap out of him. But he didn’t dare show his younger self he was afraid. As sarcastically as he could, he said, “Yeah, go ahead. Screw up your life for good. Keep going like this and you will.”

  “You sound pretty screwed up now,” his younger self said. “What have I got to lose?”

  “I had something good, and I let it slip through my fingers,” Justin said. “That’s enough to mess anybody up. You wreck what I’m doing now, you’ll go through life without knowing what a good thing was. You want that? Just keep sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. You want to end up with Megan or not?”

  Where nothing else had, that hit home. “All right,” his younger self said sullenly. “I’ll back off—for now.” He hung up. Justin stared at the phone, cursed, and put it back in its cradle.

  Megan stared at her empty plate as if she couldn’t imagine how it had got that way. Then she looked at Justin. “Did I really eat all that?” she said. “Tell me I didn’t really eat all that.”

  “Can’t do it,” he said solemnly.

  “Oh, my God!” Megan said: not Valley-girl nasal but sincerely astonished. “All those refried beans! They’ll go straight to my thighs.”

  “No, they won’t.” Justin spoke with great certainty. For as long as he’d known—would know—Megan, her weight hadn’t varied by more than five pounds. He’d never heard that she’d turned into a blimp after they broke up, either. He lowered his voice. “I like your thighs.”

  She raised a dark eyebrow, as if to say, You’re a guy. If I let you get between them, of course you like them. But the eyebrow came down. “You talk nice like that, maybe you’ll get a chance to prove it. Maybe.”

  “Okay.” Justin’s plate was as empty as hers. Loading up on heavy Mexican food hadn’t slowed him down when he was twenty-one. Now it felt like a bowling ball in his stomach. But he figured he’d manage. Figuring that, he left a bigger tip than he would have otherwise.

  The waiter scooped it up. “Gracias, señor.” He sounded unusually sincere.

  Driving north up Canoga Avenue toward his place, Justin used a sentence that had the phrase “after we’re married” in it.

  Megan had been looking at the used-car lot across the street. Her head whipped around. “After we’re what?” she said. “Not so fast, there.”

  For the very first time, Justin thought to wonder whether his younger self knew what he was doing when he took another year to get around to telling Megan he loved her. He-now had the advantage of hindsight; he knew he and Megan would walk down the aisle. But Megan didn’t know it. Right this minute, she didn’t sound delighted with the idea.

  Worse, Justin couldn’t explain that he knew, or how he knew. “I just thought—” he began.

  Megan shook her head. Her dark hair flipped back and forth. She said, “No. You didn’t think. You’re starting your senior year this fall. I’m starting my junior year. We aren’t ready to think about getting married yet, even if . . .” She shook her head again. “We aren’t ready. What would we live on?”

  “We’d manage.” Justin didn’t want to think about that even if. It had to be the start of something like, even if I decide I want to marry you. But Megan hadn’t said all of it. Justin clung to that. He had nothing else to cling to.

  “We’d manage?” Megan said. “Yeah, right. We’d go into debt so deep, we’d never get out. I don’t want to do that, not when I’m just starting. I didn’t think you did, either.”

  He kept driving for a little while. Clichés had women eager for commitment and men fleeing from it as if from a skunk at a picnic. He’d gone and offered to commit, and Megan reacted as if he ought to be committed. What did that say about clichés? Probably not to pay much attention to them.

  “Hey.” Megan touched his arm. “I’m not mad, not for that. But I’m not ready, either. Don’t push me, okay?”

  “Okay.” But Justin had to push. He knew it too damn well. He couldn’t stay in 1999 very long. Things between Megan and him had to be solid before he left the scene and his younger self took over again. His younger self, he was convinced, could fuck up a wet dream, and damn well had fucked up what should have been a perfect, li
felong relationship.

  He opened the window and clicked the security key into the lock. The heavy iron gate slid open. He drove in and parked the car. They both got out. Neither said much as they walked to his apartment.

  Not too much later, in the dark quiet of the bedroom, Megan clutched the back of his head with both hands and cried out, “Ohhh, Justin!” loud enough to make him embarrassed to show his face to the neighbors—or make him a minor hero among them, depending. She lay back on the bed and said, “You drive me crazy when you do that.”

  “We aim to please.” Did he sound smug? If he did, hadn’t he earned the right?

  Megan laughed. “Bull’s-eye!” Her voice still sounded shaky.

  He slid up to lie beside her, running his hands along her body as he did. Strike while the iron is hot, he thought. He felt pretty hot himself. He said, “And you don’t want to talk about getting married yet?”

  “I don’t want to talk about anything right now,” Megan said. “What I want to do is . . .” She did it. If Justin hadn’t been a consenting adult, it would have amounted to criminal assault. As things were, he couldn’t think of any stretch of time he’d enjoyed more.

  “Jesus, I love you,” he said when he was capable of coherent speech.

  Megan kept straddling him—not that he wanted to escape. Her face was only a couple of inches above his. Now she leaned down and kissed him on the end of the nose. “I love this,” she said, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

  He ran a hand along the smooth, sweat-slick curves of her back. “Well, then,” he said, as if the two things were the same.

  She laughed and shook her head. Her hair brushed back and forth across his face, full of the scent of her. Even though she kissed him again, she said, “But we can’t do this all the time.” At that precise moment, he softened and flopped out of her. She nodded, as if he’d proved her point. “See what I mean?”