Out of Time

It took us about a half hour to get back to school. We passed by the front, where the buses were starting to line up, and then circled around the building to the backlot. As we pulled in, I noticed that there was a guard in the booth at the entrance, and this surprised me, because there never was anyone in there. In fact, it was a running school joke.

I pointed this out to Eddie, but he was unimpressed. “It’s probably because Mike Kaplan’s car got broken into last week.” He gave a little wave as we passed through the entrance and pulled into an empty spot. Turned off the engine and climbed out, while I pressed the button to put up the top. Then I got out too.

We used the back stairs just like we’d done in the morning, and in a few seconds we were in the courtyard again. But when we tried to get into the building through the courtyard doors, they were locked. 

“Shit.” Eddie looked annoyed. “I guess we’ll have to go through the front entrance.” He turned to go back down the steps, but I stopped him.

“Wait, there’s a girl coming. Maybe she’ll let us in.” A young girl, probably a freshman, was walking down the hallway inside. I banged on the doors.

“Hey! Will you let us in?” 

The girl looked around the hallway twice before finally opening the doors. I found her caution strange, but didn’t say anything other than “Thanks” while slipping past her. She stared at us for a moment and then turned and went the other way.

“So, where to?” I asked.

“Well, it’s almost 1:45. We can catch the end of Barb’s class.” Barb Newman is our physics teacher and an ex-hippie who was actually at Woodstock. She has long shaggy hair, streaked with grey, a somewhat worn but pretty face, and a killer body. She’s also the coolest teacher in the school: ducks into the supply closet to chain-smoke between class periods; helps us cheat on state Regents exams (which she calls “a fascist conspiracy”); throws end of the year pool parties at her house… She’s also a brilliant teacher and will often skip whatever class material we’re supposed to be doing, sit on the edge of her desk, and talk to us about the Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Singularities, and other far-out stuff. Everyone loves her.

“Great idea! And she won’t care if we come in late.” I thought that seeing Barb would make me feel a lot better.

Eddie turned left at the end of the hall, which was the way to the science wing, and for a moment I lost sight of him around the corner. 

“What the…?” I heard him say. A second later I was standing next to him and saw it: a table at the far end of the hall, with a cop sitting at it. There are no cops in our school.

“Did something happen while we were gone?” I whispered.

“I don’t know.” Eddie looked genuinely confused. 

The cop made me nervous. “Let’s go the long way, so we don’t have to pass him.”  Eddie nodded, and we turned left.

We had only been walking for a minute or two when Eddie tugged on my sleeve. It gave me a little jolt, because I’d been spacing out. 

“What?” For some reason, I was still whispering.

“Where the hell is everybody?” Eddie was whispering too.

I realized, then, that other than the girl who had let us in, we hadn’t seen a single person in the halls.

“It’s the middle of classes,” I said.

“Yeah,” Eddie replied, “but are you telling me that not one person in our school has a free period now?”

He was right. In fact, I could think of half a dozen people whom I knew didn’t have class during this period. Yet, no one was around.

Something is not normal, I thought. I could see Caribbean Dennis Hopper in my mind now, his face looming. We came around another corner…

…and ran smack into another table, with another cop seated at it.

We froze.

“Hall passes…” The cop didn’t even look at us. He seemed bored.

“What?” I managed to croak. Eddie just stood there with his mouth open.

The cop looked up. “Hall passes. Where are your hall passes?”

“Hall passes?” I felt like I was on some kind of weird autopilot. “We don’t have any.”

“No hall passes.” The cop shook his head. Then he scrutinized us more carefully. “Where are your lanyards?”

The last time I had seen or heard of lanyards was in day camp in 1977, when I was eight years old. I remembered that I’d liked the Cobra stitch best, but could only manage a simple Box stitch myself. “Camp Shibley?” I was flailing.

The cop gave me a withering look. “So, it’s going to be like that, huh? Let’s see your Drivers’ Licenses. I’ll check you on the school roster and give you temporary IDs.”

Eddie and I opened our wallets, took our Drivers’ Licenses out and placed them on the table in front of the cop. I saw Eddie’s eyes widen and looked down. The licenses were orange and blue, rather than the grayish green they’d always been, with some kind of laminate covering them, and had our photos at the bottom right hand corner. I gasped.

The cop ignored me and pulled out a device consisting of a flat rectangular screen, almost like a thin, knobless TV. He tapped on several screen icons, which brought up the school roster. I took the opportunity to lean over to Eddie and whisper in his ear. “What the hell is going on? Some kind of crackdown? Martial law?”

“Maybe, but what about the driver’s licenses? And how about that mini-tv thing?” I had no answer.

The cop was scrolling through the roster by sliding his finger down the screen, so I checked out the licenses a bit more. They were made of hard plastic and had weird symbols that looked like holograms. I’d never seen anything like them before. Eddie tugged on my sleeve again, and I leaned over.

“I know what happened,” he whispered.

“You do? What?”

He didn’t answer but pointed up at the ceiling. My eyes followed the line of his arm to the tip of his finger. Hanging above us was an enormous banner, painted in white and blue, which are our school colors.

My mind raced, but before I had a chance to digest what I’d just seen, the cop was talking again.

“Ah, here we are: Daniel____ and Edward_____.” He pulled out a sheet with stickers on them marked “Temporary” and wrote our names on two of the stickers with a black marker. Handed them to us.

“Now don’t let me catch you in the halls during classes without passes again, you hear? If I do, you will be reported. And make sure you wear those lanyards tomorrow. I don’t know how you got in the building without ‘em, but it’s your responsibility to remember. If you don’t…”

“We’ll be reported. Right. Sorry! It won’t happen again.” We started backing away from the table. My whole body was tingling, and I felt like I had to confer with Eddie right away. There was no chance, though, because at that very moment the buzzer rang and the halls were mobbed with students.

“You two had better get to your last class and hop to it.” The cop looked back down at his screen-thing, and we slipped into the crowd.

“What the fuck do we do?!” I hissed at Eddie. He was frowning. 

“We can’t talk here.” He held up a hand. “And if we don’t get to our last class quickly, those cops will be onto us. Who knows how many more there are? There might be a whole police substation in here.”

“But how do we go to our class? If it’s 2014, our classes don’t exist anymore. Our teachers won’t be here anymore either!” I looked around.

“I don’t know, but I have this hunch…” Eddie’s eyes narrowed. “I bet that if we go to whatever class we should be having, our names will be on the attendance list.”

I cocked my head. “Huh? Why?”

“We were on the student roster weren’t we?”

“Yeah.”

“And don’t you think it’s funny…?”

“Think what’s funny?”

“That our pictures on those new licenses are of us, at our current age? It’s 2014, and we have current Driver’s Licenses with current photos on them?”

This hadn’t occurred to me. Eddie saw the look on my face and grabbed my arm. “C’mon. We’re supposed to have Social Studies in Room 304. Let’s go and see what happens.” He pulled me along.

“How could we not have noticed during the ride back?” I asked, as we made our way through the crowds. “I mean, it’s been twenty-nine fucking years. Shouldn’t there be flying cars or something?”  

“Clearly things haven’t changed very much or at least not in ways that are obvious.” I wasn’t paying much attention on the road. But you saw that weird screen thing the cop was holding. And look around, do you notice anything about the kids here? 

“What?” I was too stunned to notice much of anything.

“No goths. No punks. No greasers.”

I studied the students streaming by us. He was right.

“And notice something else.”

“What?”

“No one is talking.”

He was right again. Aside from the bustle, the halls were quiet.

“And look up at the ceiling corners. Subtly. Don’t draw attention.” I feigned a yawn and glanced up. There were security cameras, like the ones you see in stores in the mall.

“Jesus…”

“And you see what the cop meant by ‘lanyards’? Everyone has a rope thing around their necks with IDs attached to them. That’s why he couldn’t understand how we’d gotten in. There’s probably a checkpoint at the main entrance. The courtyard doors are locked, so they don’t expect people to come in through there.”

“Yeah.” I felt a sudden wave of depression.

“And the reason why we didn’t see anyone in the halls — the reason that chick was so stunned when she saw us — is because the campus is closed and there are no free periods.”

“Our school has been turned into a prison.”

“Looks like it,” Eddie said grimly. “Here we are.”

Mr. Russo should be inside, I thought. A hilarious, grumpy man who would refuse to allow us to leave during fire drills, on account of the fact that our room was right over the boiler, and in the case of an actual fire we (as he put it) “wouldn’t even make it to the door.” Instead, there was a very young woman who looked like she was barely out of high school herself, dressed in a way-too-short skirt that stuck to her body like cling wrap, an equally tight strapless top, and high-heeled boots. She was dressed like no teacher I’d ever seen and had we not just found out that we’d travelled almost thirty three years into the future and that the future apparently sucked, I might have appreciated this a bit more, but as things were, I pined for cranky old Russo.

Other than the change of personnel, the room looked pretty much the same as before, and Eddie and I took our regular seats, one behind the other. Then, the buzzer rang and Miss Cling Wrap took attendance.

“Clark…Cohen…Dimson…Gross…” I braced myself.

“…Jacobson…Kaplan…______….,” as she called my name, I felt the blood drain out of my face.

“Klein…Kraus…______…Levine…” at mention of his name, I saw Eddie’s back stiffen. Then, he turned around.

“I told you!” he whispered. I was in too much shock to reply.

The rest of the class passed in a haze. It was a weird civics lecture in which Miss Cling Wrap went on and on about some “Restoration,” our responsibilities as “budding citizens,” a “Senator Pike” whom I never heard of, and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t understand. At one point I even answered a question that she posed to me, though I have no idea what the question was or what I gave as a response. Then, the class — and school — was over, and everyone poured into the halls again. The underclassmen who took the bus made for the front of the building, while we and the rest of the upperclassmen who had driven to school made our way towards the courtyard doors, which had been opened by two cops who were standing on either side. In a couple of minutes, Eddie and I were back in the car again. We sat without speaking for a few moments, and then I turned to him.

 “So we’ve travelled forward in time twenty-nine years…” I had regained some of my composure.

“Maybe…” Eddie said. He was looking down at the wheel.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? You saw that banner.”

“I agree that it’s 2014, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve travelled forward in time.”

I sat back in the passenger seat. Eddie started the car and put it into reverse, but before he could start moving, I gripped his arm.

“Wait, what are you doing? Where are we going?”

“Home, of course.” He backed out of the spot and drove out the gates onto Harbor Road.

This struck me as a terrible idea. “What?! Are you crazy?!” 

“I figure home will be just like school,” Eddie remarked, making a right onto Eastern Boulevard. “Our parents will be there and will be whatever age they were this morning. My brother will be there, and he’ll still be twelve. And they’ll all act as if nothing has happened.”

For some reason the thought of this made me feel even sicker. “And how do you know this?”

Eddie gave a short laugh. “That’s the way everything’s been since we got back to school. The only people who’ve noticed that anything has changed is us. I’m guessing things will stay that way.”

Eddie made a left onto Sunnyvale, which would take us to my house in a few minutes. I was scared to death and realized that I hadn’t let go of his arm.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do this,” I said. “I’m really freaked out.”

Eddie dislodged himself from me. “Let’s have as little interaction with our families as possible; give ourselves some time to think. I’ll call you after dinner, ok?”

“Alright.” I had to agree with him, not because I thought I’d handle the scene with my parents well, but because I didn’t know what else to do.

Eddie pulled into my neighborhood, and when we stopped at the first Stop sign, I looked at my old bus stop, on the corner of Sunnyvale and The Maples. I wondered if it was still a bus stop. I wondered if eight year old kids still stood there flipping baseball cards while waiting for the bus. I wondered if Gregg Rollins still lived in the house on the corner and had a sheep dog. I wondered if I walked there tomorrow morning, I’d find kids whom I knew. I wondered…

Then, Eddie was pulling into my driveway. I felt a wave of anxiety.

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“Of course you can.” Eddie patted me. “Just be deadpan and monotone and get to your room as soon as you can. Then, think. Think!”

“Right.” I felt like a wigged out robot. Got out of the car and closed the door. “You’ll call me right?”

“You know I will.” Eddie winked and gave me the “be seeing you” sign from The Prisoner, which is one of our favorite classic TV shows. Then, he backed out of the driveway.

I let myself into the house and put my book bag on the floor in the hallway. I was tempted to run up to my room, but that would seem suspicious. Better to do what I’d normally do and seek out whomever was home, which inevitably would be my mother, since my father never gets back from work before 6:30 and I have no siblings.

I found her in the kitchen, reading the New York Times. She looked exactly as she’d looked in the morning. Not a second older or different in any other way. I stared at her with a kind of dumb amazement, having to remind myself that twenty nine years had passed, and realized that I was holding my breath. I let out a loud exhale, and she looked up.

“Oh, there you are. How was school?”

“Uh, fine. Nothing interesting happened.”

“Hmm.” She looked back down at the newspaper. I noticed that the pictures were in color, which initially struck me as cool but after a moment seemed wrong. From what I could tell (scanning the front page upside-down), there were widespread riots and uprisings across the Middle East, from Tripoli to Tehran, and we were apparently in at least two wars, one in Central America and the other in Scandinavia of all places. My mother looked back up again.

“So, what are you going to do now?”

For some reason, this question caught me off guard. “I’m a little tired. I think I’ll take it easy and read until dinner.”

“Ok. We’re having quiche.” She readjusted the glasses on her nose and returned to her paper.

“Right. Awesome.” I turned around and made for the stairs and my room on the second floor.

It seemed familiar at first. Twin beds, with blue bedspreads, perpendicular to each other in the far left corner; two sets of double windows, with the choo-choo train drapes that I never bothered to change; the great old wooden desk with the lid that opens and closes. But then I started noticing differences: There should have been a bunch of pictures of Brooke Shields on the wall, but they were gone and replaced with several posters of athletes whom I didn’t recognize; and on top of the dresser, where my record player should have been, there was a sleek silver box with no apparent wires of any kind and a number of illuminated buttons. But, the most noticeable thing was on my desk. I figured that it must be a computer, because it bore some vague resemblance to the Apple 2E that I have — it had a screen and a keyboard and the Apple logo — but that’s where any similarities ended. This looked like something out of a science fiction novel: an enormous thin, silver screen; a tiny keyboard with nothing connecting it to anything; and a little biscuit shaped thing next to it, also seemingly connected to nothing, which slid across the desk when I poked it. I saw no obvious way to turn the computer on, so I left it alone.

I threw myself on one of the beds and stared at the ceiling. My mind turned to the question of when the switch could have happened. It must have been 1985 when we left school in the morning, since that clearly was no longer possible. It also had to have been 1985 when we first got to the beach, because we ran into Jessie, Claudia, and Jill.

I wracked my brains, but the memories came slowly, which was a little strange since all of this just happened earlier today. I figured that it also had to have been 1985 when we went to the bar, since we used the fake driver’s licenses that we’d gotten on 42nd street and not the new licenses we have now.

Then we had that weird encounter with Caribbean Dennis Hopper, and it was after this that everything changed. Could he have made it happen? I couldn’t see how. I mean, we travelled through time, for God’s sake. Something else must have happened. But, I couldn’t think of anything. There’d been no cosmic event between the time we were done with him and the time we arrived at school. We just drove back and found that everything was different. I focused on the drive back but couldn’t remember thinking that the cars seemed strange or that anything was out of the ordinary, whether traffic signals, street lights, retail signs, gas stations, or anything else.

I thought that I must be forgetting something; that I’d missed some crucial detail that would have given away exactly when time had jumped forward. But, just as I was setting my mind to go back over all the events of the day again, I heard the door open and shut downstairs and voices come up through the floor. My father was home.

I’d better go down and say ‘Hello’, I thought. They’ll expect that. I got up from the bed and hurried out of my room. 

Dad was still hanging his coat up at the front door and putting all of his stuff down, when he saw me. “Hey there!” He looked harried, as he usually does when he gets home from work.

“Good day?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said, “except for that goddamned commute. Two and a half hours tonight. Some goddamned tractor trailer overturned on the goddamned L.I.E.” My father always invokes God when discussing New York traffic.

“Dinner’s ready,” my mother said. “We can eat whenever you want.”

“Let’s do it now,” my father pulled at his tie. “I’ve got more work to do afterwards.” He gave up on the tie, which dangled around his neck, and made his way into the kitchen.

I watched him as we ate. Not one thing was out of place. The same brown and grey combover hair. The same fifty-seven year old face. The same manner of speaking. The same everything. I prayed that I wouldn’t be drawn into any kind of conversation and made a show of concentrating on my food.

Fortunately, my father wasn’t in a talkative mood. I’ve seen this many times. Four hours of commuting — two hours each way — plus eight hours of work, plus the prospect of more work after dinner often leaves him kind of blank. After lighter workdays, he typically talks about politics or business (and I emphasize “talk” — my father isn’t much of a listener, but whose father is?) and it’s usually pretty heated. He’s a powerful, intense man. But there are limits to what even he can take, and as I watched him eating, I wondered whether in the twenty-nine years that passed, the grind of the typical workday had gotten even worse than it was in 1985. I thought to myself, With the exception of a few stray weekends and vacations here and there, when’s the last time I saw my father while it was still daylight? and if you asked me to guess, I would say that it was when I was a little kid, in the early 1970s.

The table wasn’t completely silent. My mother and father made some small talk and asked me a few simple questions, which I answered, and then dinner was over. Dad shuffled off to his home office to do whatever work he’d brought home with him, and I cleared the table of all the dishes, which my mother loaded into the dishwasher. Then she settled back into her paper, and I returned to my room. Once there and after closing the door, I breathed a sigh of relief. Even though nothing happened, I felt like I’d been through an interrogation.

I lay down on the bed again thinking I’d go over the day’s events one more time, but at that moment the phone rang. It was Eddie. The relief at hearing his voice was almost overwhelming. 

“How’d it go at your house?” I asked.

“Weird as hell but OK. Everything seemed normal. My mother’s still cool, my brother’s still annoying, and my father’s still a dick.”

I shook my head. ““You were right. It’s like nothing’s happened.”

“What makes you think anything has?” Eddie’s voice was quiet.

“You said that in the car, and I still don’t get it.” I wrapped and unwrapped the curly phone cord around my finger. “This morning it was 1985. Now it’s 2014. Which means that we’ve travelled twenty-nine years forward in time.”

“Not necessarily.”Eddie was being infuriatingly mysterious.

“You’ve obviously got some theory about this that hasn’t occurred to me, so let’s hear it.”

“You keep assuming that we traveled through time,” Eddie said. “That first we were in 1985 and then, suddenly, we were in 2014.”

“Well, yeah. It’s what happened.”

“Is it?” I heard Eddie take a sip of a drink. “What if it’s been 2014 all along and we didn’t travel anywhere?”

“What?!” I wondered If he had gone nuts. Or was drunk. “I’ve been thinking along the lines of a miniature black hole or a tesseract or something like that.”

Eddie took another sip. Cleared his throat. “There’s a number of things that don’t make sense on that sort of theory.”

I moved the phone cradle to the side of the bed. “Like what?”

“Well, for one thing, how do you explain the fact that we were on both the school and class rosters? If we’d traveled through time, we wouldn’t have been on any list of students.”

He was right, of course.

“And the licenses. How do you explain them? Current driver’s licenses with our current pictures on them?”

“I can’t.” I began to feel sick again.

“And what about our parents or my brother? Why are they exactly the same age and in the same places they were this morning? If we went forward in time, they should be twenty-nine years older. I doubt my brother would still be living here, and as for my parents…,” he paused, “they’d probably be divorced.”

“Are you saying we’ve gone crazy? Or that we hallucinated the whole 1985 thing?” I frowned. “It doesn’t feel like any hallucination I’ve ever had. I mean, I’ve tried ‘shrooms, Mescaline… they’re nothing like this.”

“Hallucinating? Both of us? At the same time?” Eddie snorted. “I doubt it.”

“Then what? Mind control? Someone or something made us think it was 1985 or that it’s 2014 now?”

“No…” Eddie sounded like he was struggling. “Nothing like that. You’re being too literal.”

“And what about Caribbean Dennis Hopper?”

“What about him?” Eddie asked.

“Maybe he had something to do with it.” I was groping. “I mean, he told us that it wasn’t … isn’t … you know, 1985.”

“I’ve been wondering about that.” Eddie sniffed. “Wasn’t it odd the way he described high school? That what he described was identical to what’s been our normal experience…or at least, what we thought was our normal experience.”

“Yeah, I didn’t really understand that. I was kind of floored by the whole thing.”

“Well, think about it. That Dennis Hopper guy was in his late forties or early fifties, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what I remember too.”

“So, if it’s 2014 now, then he….”

“Was in high school in the late seventies or eighties. Christ.”

“So, he was right. Things were better when he, not you or I, was in high school.”

It was as if for a moment I could see impossible figures. Dennis Hopper had described something that had already happened — was happening — to us in 2014, and it was he who had been a teenager in 1985, not Eddie and me.

I swallowed. “I don’t see how this affects what we’re talking about, though; how Dennis Hopper proves that we didn’t travel through time.”

“He doesn’t.” Eddie admitted.

“And your theory — that the only thing that’s changed is us — it’s got some problems too.” 

“Like what?”

“That school we saw this afternoon? Cop Central?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think anyone could get out of there at ten thirty in the morning and go on a merry ride to the beach?”

“No.” Eddie seemed hesitant.

“So, how did we do it?”

“I guess it’s my turn to admit I can’t explain something.” I beamed to myself at the thought that I’d stumped him and that my theory wasn’t stupid after all.

“And yet…” My beam was prematurely cut off.

“What?”

“I still think you’re being too literal; too straightforward. This thing that’s happened might be really subtle. Don’t think along the lines of an Asimov or Heinlein novel, but something more like Kafka or Philip K. Dick. Think about The Man in the High Castle.

I thought about it. Didn’t like it at all.

“I mean…” Eddie trailed off. “We were there. I know it. But we’ve also always been here. I feel like I know that too.”

I half understood him and half didn’t, and what he said gave me goosebumps. Because at that moment I knew that whatever had happened, it might never be undone. We weren’t going to make a pact with the physics teacher and figure out a way back home through a wormhole; there’d be no violent confrontation with the leaders of the conspiracy forcing them to return our memories to us; we wouldn’t go back to the beach to find Caribbean Dennis Hopper and convince him to send us back to 1985. There was no solution, a la Doctor Who or Star Trek. We might very well be stuck here for the rest of our lives.

“So what do we do now?”

“Carry on.” Eddie said. “What else is there to do?”

“Just pretend? Act as if we know people whom we’ve never met? That’s going to be hard.” I tried to imagine getting through conversations at school without using anyone’s name and then realized that it wouldn’t be difficult at all, since I could just look at the IDs hanging on their lanyards. The thought made me feel sad.

“It won’t be so bad,” Eddie said. “It’s not as if anyone pays that close attention to what people say. The students and teachers here — not to mention our families — obviously know us and will give all sorts of cues as to what kinds of guys we are, whom we hang out with, what we do; stuff like that. It’ll be a little awkward at first.”

“And what about Benji? Jessie? All of our friends? They’re just gone?”

“I don’t know, Danny.” Now, Eddie sounded sad too.

“I’m exhausted,” I said to myself as much as to him.

“Yeah,” Eddie sighed. “Wanna call it a night? I mean, we’ll see each other tomorrow morning.”

“I’m scared.”

“Why?”

“What if we wake up and don’t remember any of this?” I was huddled against the wall, now, cradling the phone between my ear and my shoulder, the curly cord wrapped around my arm. “What if you and me aren’t even friends here?

“I don’t think that will happen.” Eddie sounded reassuring. “I mean, haven’t you figured it out yet?”

“What?”

“That when things suck, they always suck in a boring way, not an exciting one?

For some reason, this made me feel better. “Alright, I’ll sign off. See you tomorrow?”

“You know you will.” Eddie hung up. I could see him, alone in his bedroom, giving the “Be seeing you” sign.

I put down the receiver, and in the moment before it went into the cradle, I found my attention drawn to the rotary dialer and the numbers 1 through 0.