Extra Life (9 page)

The sun’s position in the sky, the dewiness still spritzing the air, the smell of fresh donuts from the bakery down the street… it all hit me like another disorienting flash.

Morning.
It was morning.

The white light from my phone had somehow blacked me out for
hours
. Close to twelve hours. Except it wasn’t possible. No way I could’ve hung unconscious from the tower all night long. Heck, I couldn’t have lasted for even a second like that. I should’ve been a dead guy, a splat on the pavement.

I had to stop my mind-spin and catch my breath. The only choice
was to hunker down behind a dumpster. There were probably more fragrant places to gasp for air, but with a few free seconds to think, I quelled the urge to puke and charted my next move.

Two loading docks down, I snagged cardboard from a recycling stack. Sirens down the street, likely meant for me, the Front Street Streaker. I cut across the main road at full trot, knees knocking the stiff toga I fashioned for myself.

Some jerk tapped his car horn at me, but I kept my head in the game. Another back lot, a narrow wooded park, and a cemetery where none of the residents gave a damn how I was dressed.

My last obstacle was a stretch of back yards—uneventful, until I came across a grandma in a housedress, hosing down her lawn. She screeched like I was a scurrying rat. Then she cranked the setting on her nozzle to biting cold Proton Stream and soaked my cardboard clothes into oatmealy goop before I was safely out of her range.

In another few minutes I was heaving for breath out behind Conrad’s house. He had to be home from the hospital by now, and Connie’s was the closest safe zone I could think of, even if a warm welcome was probably not in store for me. But I was brimming with ready apologies. Funny how a twelve-hour blackout and fifteen minutes of running naked through town could cripple my pride.

I had to talk this through with Connie. I had to count on his forgiveness, but then again I’d never pushed him so far as I did at the diner, at least not since the prank, before we were friends. Under normal conditions it’d take me at least another day to plan exactly how I’d redeem myself. Connie wasn’t the type of dude where you could just tell him
chill out, I’m only screwing
and move on. Dealing with him was like constantly making the twentieth move in Jenga.

The trickier part was that his mom was probably also home, probably sewing together a voodoo doll of me so she could torture it in retribution for her son’s trip to the hospital. So I decided to be discreet. I snuck around to the side yard and tossed pinecones at his bedroom window. Three tries before he peeked through his blinds at me.

Just as fast, he flicked them shut.

So that was it. After everything I did for him, not even the decency to hear me out. I snatched a rock the size of a golf ball and prepped for a pitch, but breaking glass wouldn’t earn me any points. So I dropped the rock and trudged away, shivering. Maybe somewhere in this row of houses I could find a stocked clothesline to borrow from, even if it meant I’d have to dress in drag. Nobody’s perfect.

“Russ, what the heck are you doing?” Connie asked from his back doorway. He stepped onto the wraparound porch, still in his bowling shirt from yesterday. Clean freaks like Connie usually didn’t wear the same shirt twice before washing, but maybe he’d just been discharged from the hospital, hadn’t even had a chance to change.

“I came to apologize,” I told him.

“Apologize for what? And why are you wearing a box?”

“For trying to force you to do my movie…”

“You’re not forcing me. It’s something I have to do.”

“Well, it’s all in the past now. It’s DOA.”

Connie’s glasses weren’t exactly the right prescription so he had to tilt his head back to get a clearer angle. There I was—wet cardboard, teeth chattering. He said, “Uh, okay. You need to come inside?”

“Is your mother awake?”

“She’s doing her shift at the hospital. Come on.” He turned to head back inside, trusty backpack strapped to him as securely as a parachute, even though it was another hour before we were supposed to leave for school. The backpack was such a Connie fixture that the baffling fact of its being there on his shoulders didn’t hit me until we were halfway up the stairs to his bedroom.

It should’ve been
at my house.
Where I left it.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked, tugging on a dangling nylon strap.

“Target, I think,” he said.

“No, I mean—you left it at the Silver Bullet yesterday.”

“Didn’t go to the Silver Bullet yesterday.”

“Jeez—you don’t even remember?”

“Huh?” he said.

“Never mind.” I didn’t want to push too hard about his panic attack and all that, especially if it was so bad he blocked it from memory. Until fifteen minutes ago, I would’ve thought it was nuts to lose track of time like that.

In Connie’s room the blinds were drawn, so the only real light was artificial. His TV airing the WCPF morning news, computer paused on
Dragon Rage 2
, iPad on the bed displaying one of his four alias Facebook profiles. And, of course, the glow-in-the-dark model universe spinning in constant battery-operated orbits along its ceiling tracks.

I grabbed a pair of jeans from the designated cubby and tugged them over my wet legs. When the fabric touched my scraped-up knee, I hissed from the pain. Connie was half a foot taller and a few inches thicker so I was basically in clown pants.

“How about
underwear
?” Connie said.

“Don’t have any, and I’m not wearing yours,” I told him.

“
Okay
,” he said. “So what’s going on? Why were you naked, and a half hour early—which you
never
are? What the crap happened to your eye? Did somebody hit you?” The heaviness of his own questions made him flop on the bed, pressing both hands against the sides of his skull.

“I told you already. And it’s Saturday,” I realized aloud. “No school.”

“It’s Friday. School,” Connie said.

All right, at this point, I had to accept that a huge factor in this equation was missing or wrong, and my gut said it was
me
. Connie’s digital clock said it was 7:20 a.m. Lost memory, strange texts and videos, twelve-hour blackouts, public nudity.

I said, “Listen, the freakiest thing happened last night.”

“I’m going to go ahead and say it’s
still
happening,” Connie suggested.

I glanced through the window overlooking the street, unsure what to expect. Police raid? Prank show camera crew? I was the wacko in the spy flick who nobody believed, but whose paranoia
always
turned out to be totally justified.

“Just look at this video I got.” I hunched over Connie’s computer and minimized the dragon game, brought up Firefox so I could access the online records of my text messages.

Connie said, “Okay, but it’s Friday. That’s all I’m saying.”

Also claiming it was Friday: the computer calendar and the super in the corner of the TV screen.

I entered my login and password. The listing of my texts came up, but the video I supposedly sent myself was deleted. The
take the leap
message was gone, too. So were all the Friday messages from Savannah and Paige and Connie, all the way back to a text from Connie I got on Thursday night, reminding me to set my wakeup alarm to stun.

Like Friday never happened.

“What video?” Connie asked over my shoulder.

“It’s gone.” And then I remembered what I said to myself in that recorded message—what Video Russ said to me, anyway, just before he sent that app, or whatever it was, the thing called The Pastime Project. He said:

Your one chance to make things right. This is the real leap
…

The Pastime Project app had downloaded itself to my phone at seven p.m. Friday night. Judging from the current time, I had been out-of-order for twelve hours exactly. Half a day, but half a day in the
wrong direction
. A leap, like Daylight Saving Time, except it only happened to me.

I was going to have to say it out loud.

“Connie, man, I’m pretty sure I sent myself backwards in time.”

“N
O WAY
,” Connie said.

“Yes way.”

“Not possible.”

“But…”

Connie was all about empirical evidence. The video message, twelve hours of skipped-over time, the mysterious traveling backpack, the Saturday-that-was-actually-Friday, the radio tower gate that was locked and then not locked. It took another fifteen minutes to even start to convince him, and he was the perfect uber-geek audience for an idea like this. Time travel via a mobile app.

This was one of those twisted physics scenarios he only ever dreamed of or discussed over endless threads on his sci-fi message boards. I suspected
he
suspected I was rolling out some elaborate Alternate Reality Game, and it was his job to play out my ridiculous scenario through all its logical bends, never once letting on that this was all a joke.

Otherwise, I’d have to accept that he actually
believed
me.

“Okay, let’s withhold judgment on this,” he told me. “But I have to say, there’s an
elegance
to what you’re describing,” he said. “You don’t even understand it.
That
’s what makes it maybe kind of work.”

“Right,” I said. “Wait—what?”

He paced a small stretch of his room, cranked on his Deep Thoughts. His head bumped the dangling model planets and set them on cataclysmic orbits. “
If
something like this could really happen, then
of course
you’d get sent through the warp without any clothes because it could only reconstitute your biological material. Otherwise, you’d end up with fabric woven into your skin, and buttons where your eyes should be, like in
Revenge of the Replicons
.”

“Lovely,” I said, feeling pukey again. My whole body suddenly itched.

“If you’re making this up, you really thought it through. I’m impressed.”

“It happened.”

“Okay,
but:
the temporal wormhole, or whatever it was, that kind of tech is total fantasy. It’s not logically possible.
Man
, I wish I could’ve seen that video,” Connie said.

I was still working on the logistics myself, and admittedly getting nowhere. If it was really half-past-seven on Friday morning, then the video I watched wouldn’t be sent to my phone for another eleven hours and change. It didn’t
exist
yet, so there was obviously no way to access it.

“No, no—
wait
!” Connie said. “We’re talking information paradox here.”

“We are?”

“Info-dox, a time-travel impossibility. You act on information supplied by a future self, who learned the information from a future self, and so on and so on. An endless chain that has no beginning. The information has no actual source, you see?”

I thought about it for a second and realized that Arnold Schwarzenegger could be used to explain everything. “So it’s like how the severed metal arm off the terminator from the future provides the tech that the present-day engineers need to invent SkyNet, which invented the terminator, that went back in time and got its arm cut off.”

“
Exactly
!” Connie lunged at me and just about boxed my ears. His manic, magnified eyes darted all over my face. Far as I could remember, he’d never so much as looked straight at me for longer than a second.

“You’re creeping me out, dude,” I said.

“Actually, your theory works only if you’re only counting
T1
and
2
as canon. It falls apart if you account for the temporal modifications in the reboot, but that wasn’t really…”

“Connie…”

He cleared his throat and dropped his arms. “
In theory
, I mean.”