"You're not gonna do it are you?" I asked quickly.
"Yeah." He told me. "I am. Fuck going to class for six hours every day."
"Mike." I told him. "This isn't the end. You can still stay in school and graduate next year. You can still get on with the fire department after you graduate. You just have to tell them in the interview that you were a dumb kid and that…"
"Fuck that." Mike said angrily. "I'm going into independent study. We sent in the application today. Should be approved by next week."
"Mike," I pleaded, "We're almost halfway through the school year! You'll be done before you know it! Just hang in there for another few…"
"Fuck it!" He repeated. "I'm staying in that fuckin shithole any longer than I have to. I shoulda gone into independent study in the first place. I'd a been done by now.
"But…"
"I gotta go." He said. "I'll see you around."
With a click he hung up the phone. Slowly I replaced mine in the holder.
I sat for the longest time, trying to think my way through all of the crap that had suddenly come down in the last week but I couldn't. There was too much of it and it was cluttering up my mind. I would no sooner start to think about one aspect when another would push it's way forward, demanding my attention.
I went upstairs to my room and opened up my nightstand drawer. I looked in the cutout section of my bible and found what I needed. I took it out and pocketed it carefully. When Dad got home I asked him if I could use his car for a few hours. He handed me the keys and asked if I would be home for dinner.
"Probably not." I told him, heading out the door.
I drove to the park near the falls; the location of many a kegger. No keggers were going on at the moment since it was daytime and no families were picnicking at the moment since it was October and the weather wasn't quite up for such things. I locked up Dad's car and walked to a trail that led down to the river near the top of the falls. I began hiking.
Twenty minutes later I was standing less than a hundred yards from where the water arced over the cliff. The roar of the falls was very loud and a fine mist from below drifted through the air, blown by the prevailing winds. I found myself a comfortable spot and sat down. I then reached into my pocket and pulled out the half joint that I'd extricated from my bible.
I'd noticed long before I'd been recycled that a little marijuana helped me think deeply about things. It helped keep my thoughts from being sidetracked into something else. Though I was aware of the irony of what I was doing, using the very substance that had brought Mike down in order to help come up with a solution to his problem, as well as the many others that I'd set in motion, I took out a lighter and lit the joint. As I smoked I stared at the falls, watching the water cascade over the edge to its collision with the lower river. The sight was mesmerizing, the sound nothing but white noise. By the time I'd finished the roach my mind was clear and I began trying to think things through.
Patterns. That was what it came down to. There were two separate time lines I was dealing with. What had happened in my first trip from 1982 to 1999 and what was happening in my second trip. When I'd first come over it had seemed so simple. Everything was new, everything was fresh. I had not really believed at all that I would have to worry about the way things had turned out in my first life. But now, after all the things that had happened, I was seeing definite patterns between the two time lines. Though some things had changed I was seeing a definite tendency for things, people especially, to drift into the patterns that had apparently been set for them. As for who or what had set those patterns, I knew not and I cared not. I was only concerned with the question of whether or not the patterns were tendencies or absolute.
Mike. In my previous life he'd gone to independent study and dropped out of school. He'd joined the Air Force a few years later and the few times I heard from him after that he'd seemed to like his job as missile technician in Wyoming. However he was discovered to have marijuana in his system after a random drug test and given a choice between an Article 15 or a dishonorable discharge without criminal complaint, he chose the discharge. In this time line I'd successfully steered him off of that path at it's beginning and onto a different one, that of a firefighter. I'd kept him in high school longer than he had been previously and I'd honestly thought that I'd changed his destiny. But then he was caught using marijuana at the fire station. He was thrown out of ROP and was now planning to re-enter independent study. He'd steered himself right back into the other path with only two days worth of effort. Was he now committed to that path? Was there no way for me to steer him back again? Was it pointless to even try?
Nina. In her previous life she'd been taunted and ignored throughout her school years, eventually turning into a bitter, though highly educated person. It would be readily apparent to every person that dealt with her on a regular basis in my first life that she suffered from a raging inferiority complex. She was driven by the desire to appear smarter, better, faster, more competent, more everything, than everyone else around her. She was driven by this desire because deep inside she would always be the butt of everyone's jokes and would always feel she was inferior to everyone. The facade she would put up to convince herself and others to the contrary would often be brutal to those it touched. But in this timeline I'd steered her off of that path. I'd befriended her and, with the help of others, showed her that she really was a good person. For the longest time it seemed she could not fall into her original pattern. And then yours truly, in my idiocy, jerked her heart out of her chest and stomped on it. Now she was back to eating alone in the cafeteria, back to being uncommunicative with everyone. She was on her way to college and medical school next year. In the nineties would she show up in the emergency room in Spokane once again with the same chip on her shoulder, the same attitude? Although the trip took a different pathway than before it sure seemed to me she was heading for the same place.
Tracy. This was the problem that concerned me more than anything else. In the previous time line a football player named David Mitchell had gotten drunk one night and driven my sister into the Spokane River, killing her. I'd prevented that from occurring, true enough, but it was disquieting to me that the Camero had STILL crashed into the river, that Lisa Sanchez had STILL been killed in the accident, and that Barbie Langston, who had taken Tracy's place in the car, had NOT been killed. And now Tracy was dating a baseball player named Darren Maxwell. Was it coincidence that he had the same initials? Was fate simply waiting for another chance to claim Tracy, who's demise was already written in some celestial book somewhere? If so, was there anything I could do about it? Was there anything she could do about it?
And that brought me to the troubling problem of Anita. She, for a change of pace, had deviated way off of the path that she'd taken before. She had not gone out with the man that she was going to marry in the previous time line and had instead fallen in love with me after I'd initiated an affair with her. She called her intended a pinhead in fact. Why was Anita different? Or was she?
I stared at the falls and ran all these things through my mind, one by one. Mike, Anita, Tracy, Myself, Beirut, trying to determine if there were any absolutes, any hard, fast rules to this thing. I stayed there for a long time, staring and thinking, thinking and staring, watching the water rush by in the river.
Was fate, I wondered, like that river? A liquid stream rushing along towards a fixed destination. All of the billions of drops of water in that river were destined to end up, eventually, in the ocean. You could take a few drops out and move them back upstream a few feet or a few miles but they would still end up passing by the same point again, they would still end up in the ocean. A few drops would occasionally splash out of the stream for a while, seeming to free themselves of the current but they would eventually be brought right back into the flow. That was their destiny. That was their fate.