My room was a filthy mess. I was offended by it. During my adult years I'd lost my teenaged sloppiness and had become something of a neat freak. Though I was still feeling the effects of the marijuana I'd smoked earlier and desperately wanted to lie down and take a nap, I began picking up the room.
It took me nearly two hours to get it clean, but it was a fascinating two hours none-the-less. I came across many objects and possessions that I had not seen in years. I found places for them and by the time I finished it was quite a startling change. But there was one thing missing.
While I'd been cleaning I'd heard the sound of my father coming home. I sincerely hoped for Tracy's sake that she'd cleaned the house well enough. I guessed that she had since she and Cindy were in her room, looking through some magazines as I passed by. Jeff of course, was long gone. Both girls watched me as I went by, shutting up with whatever they'd been talking about. I smiled, especially at Cindy, who returned it weakly.
Dad was sitting in his chair and drinking a bottle of beer. The television was on, showing an early edition of the local news. Again I found myself staring at him, marveling on how young he looked, how thin. He wasn't much older than I was in a way. He caught me staring at him and looked at me.
"You okay Bill?" He asked, concern in his voice.
"Oh sure Dad. " I nodded. "I'm cool. I was just tryin' to picture you with gray hair. "
"What?" He chuckled. "Why would you do that?"
"Well, Grampa has gray hair doesn't he? It stands to reason that you will too doesn't it? I was just trying to picture what you would look like. "
"That's kind of depressing. " He smiled, sipping out of his beer. "What brought you to that subject?"
"Oh, uh, we were studying genetics in Anatomy the other day. That's a dominate trait you know?"
"I've heard that. " He answered. "What're you up to?"
"Just getting the vacuum cleaner. "
Now he really looked at me strange. "The what?"
"The vacuum cleaner. " I said. "I just got done cleaning my room and now I need to vacuum it. "
"You cleaned your room?" He asked in disbelief. "You?"
"Yeah. " I nodded. "It was pretty dirty. Why did you guys ever let me get away with being so messy anyway?"
"What?"
"Never mind. " I said, moving towards the living room closet. I opened it and the vacuum was there. "I'll bring it back in a minute. "
While I carried the appliance upstairs his puzzled look followed me up.
After I stowed the vacuum back in its closet I went back upstairs to lie down. Though I was exhausted I could not sleep. For one I was afraid. What if I went to sleep and woke up back in my other life? Was that possible? I surely didn't know. What I was dealing with here was way beyond my limited range of knowledge. My very existence back in 1982 was something I'd thought impossible but here I was. Somehow that dying Chinese man had done this to me. How I knew not. Were there any rules? I could conceive of being only allowed one day. It seemed possible that I was only allowed one waking period back here. I was not ready to return yet.
But there was also the possibility that I was stuck here for good. I had to consider that too. In fact I considered that the most likely scenario. There were many ramifications to that possibility and I needed to think them through carefully. How much did I dare to change? How much could I change?
What would happen if someone found out about what had happened to me? There were people in the world that would do almost anything to get their hands on me if my situation became known. Governments wanting to know about the next seventeen years, business people wanting to know about stock trends. I could envision my family being held hostage to get me to do their bidding.
My initial thought had been to confide in Tracy. But I wondered if that was so wise. Tracy was after all, a teenager full of teenage stupidity as my earlier discovery graphically pointed out. I no longer thought that she could be trusted with a secret of this magnitude. But at the same time I needed to make sure that she did not get in the car with that college student on her graduation night. I had vowed to myself that I would prevent her death even if I could change nothing else on my return trip. That conviction was as strong in me as ever. Tracy would NOT die that night. One way or another I would see to it.
But that brought me back to the one night theory. If I couldn't tell her my secret, but if I was only allowed one night here, how could I make sure of her survival? I thought about that one for a while and finally I came up with something.
That left me to ponder the other questions in my mind. Suppose I was here for good. What else could I change? And how could I better myself and my family? I certainly did not want to end up right back where I was in seventeen years. I wanted to do things differently this time. But how? What could I do?
I reluctantly admitted to myself that I would lose Becky, my daughter in the process. This thought hurt me more than anything ever had before, but it was simply inevitable. Becky had been a very pleasant side effect of a brutal mistake that I'd made in my previous life. I simply could not, no matter how much I loved my daughter, repeat that mistake. I couldn't. I told myself that I wasn't killing her. She would just never exist in the first place. My mind was able to draw a distinction between those two things; a shaky one, but a distinction.
I lay there for more than two hours, until my mother called me down for dinner. I had a rough plan of sorts in mind by then. It was a plan that would be extensively modified and revised, but it was a plan. I felt better just having one.
Dinner was my mom's tacos. They were fried in grease and would be politically incorrect by today's standards. Each one had to have at least a hundred grams of fat. But God they were delicious. I chowed down five of them, shoveling in mounds of rice and beans as accompaniment and then washing the mess down with two Coke's from the refrigerator. The only thing that would have made them better would have been a pitcher of margaritas but I figured mom probably wouldn't whip up a batch for me.
She seemed gratified to see me eat so much. It probably put her worries about drugs aside for the moment. I remembered that I was living in the midst of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" era and that my mom had had her drug worries fueled by the little pamphlets that this era produced. The pamphlets always had "warning signs" that your kids were on drugs printed in them. I remembered how bizarre those so called warning signs had seemed to me even on my first trip through fifteen. A big one had been "loss of appetite". What was up with that? Maybe if you'd moved all the way through marijuana and had worked your way to a two hundred-dollar a day cocaine habit you would have a loss of appetite. But most teenagers simply smoked pot. Loss of appetite was most definitely not a symptom of marijuana use. They should have put "greatly increased appetite" instead. They should have put in "excessive use of Visine" as well.
I also remembered that the pamphlets had so called terminology for drugs. The theory was that parents would overhear their kids using these terms and would therefore know they were on drugs. Right, as if the kids would talk about drugs in front of their parents. I remembered having big laughs with my friends as we read these pamphlets, usually while we were stoned. Those that had used drugs in the previous generation had obviously transcribed the terminology. They said that common terms for marijuana were: Tea, Mary Jane, leaf, wonder green, and other such nonsense. None of the terms were current. In my age they called it pot, buds, herb, smoke, KGB, greenbud, and weed; none of which were listed in Nancy's pamphlets. I could imagine the laughter that would have resulted in the eighties if a kid had asked someone if they had any Mary Jane or tea for sale. I was forced to wonder if there had ever been a case of some kid being drawn off the path of drug abuse as a result of those "informational" pamphlets.