Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  Justin didn’t think of himself like that, of course. As far as he was concerned, he stood at the top of the cool food chain. And so, when he’d pulled off the freeway and driven the couple of blocks to what his Thomas Brothers guide showed as the biggest shopping center in Simi Valley, he made gagging noises. “It’s not even a mall!” he exclaimed. And it wasn’t, not by his standards: no single, enormous, air-conditioned building in which to roam free. If he wanted to go from store to store, he had to expose his tender hide to the sun for two, sometimes three, minutes at a time.

  He almost turned around and drove back to his apartment. In the end, with a martyred sigh, he parked the car and headed toward a little mom-and-pop software store. It turned out to be all PC stuff. He had Virtual PC, so he could run Windows programs on his Macs, but he left in a hurry anyway. They’d go okay on the iMac, which was a pretty fast machine, but they’d be glacial on the old PowerBook he had with him.

  The Wherehouse a couple of doors down was just as depressing. Grunge, metal, rap, bands his parents had listened to—yeah, they had plenty of that stuff. British pop? He found one, count it, one Oasis CD, filed under the rest of o. Past that? Nada.

  “Boy, this is fun,” he said as he stomped out in moderately high dudgeon. He spotted a Borders halfway across the shopping center and headed toward it. Even as he did, he wondered why he bothered. The way his luck was running, it would stock a fine assortment of computer magazines from 1988.

  Behind him, somebody called, “Justin!” He kept walking. Half the guys in his generation—all the ones who weren’t Jasons—were Justins. But the call came again, louder, more insistent: “Hey, Justin!”

  Maybe it is me, he thought, and turned around. A startled smile spread over his face. “Lindsey!” he said. Sure as hell, Lindsey Fletcher came running up to him, rubber-soled sandals scuffing on the sidewalk. He opened his arms. They gave each other a big hug.

  “I can’t believe it,” Lindsey said. “What are you doing up here? You never come up here. I’ve never seen you up here, anyway.” She spoke as if one proved the other.

  She’d always liked to talk, Justin remembered. He remembered the mole on the side of her neck, too. It was still there, a couple of inches above the top of her T-shirt. “How are you?” he said. “How’ve you been?”

  “I’m fine.” She looked him up and down. “God, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Yeah, well,” Justin said, a little uncomfortably. He knew how little he would change, too, which she didn’t.

  “What are you doing up here?” Lindsey asked again.

  “Whatever,” Justin answered. “A little shopping. Hanging out. You know.”

  “Here? It’s a lot better in the Valley.” She looked astonished and sounded wistful.

  “Yeah, well,” he said again: he’d already discovered that. “Something new.”

  “Slumming,” Lindsey told him. “But as long as you’re here, that donut place over there isn’t too bad.” She pointed. “I mean, if you want to get something and, you know, talk for a little while.”

  “Sure,” Justin said. Like a lot of the little donut shops in Southern California, this one was run by Cambodians: a middle-aged couple who spoke with accents and a teenage boy who talked just like Justin and Lindsey. Lindsey tried to buy; Justin wouldn’t let her, not with his older self’s money burning a hole in his wallet. They got jelly donuts and big fizzy Cokes, sat down at one of the half-dozen or so little tables in the shop, and proceeded to get powdered sugar all over their faces.

  “What have you been up to?” Lindsey asked, dabbing at herself with a paper napkin.

  “Finished my junior year at CSUN,” Justin answered, pronouncing it C-sun, the way anybody who went there would.

  “What’s your major?”

  “Computer science. It’s pretty interesting, and it’ll pay off, too—I’ve got a summer job at the Northridge CompUSA.” Which my older self is welcome to. Half a beat slower than he should have, Justin asked, “How about you?”

  “I’ve been going to Moorpark Community College kind of on and off,” Lindsey said. “I’ve got a part-time job, too—pet grooming.”

  “Ah, cool,” Justin said. “You always did love animals. I remember.”

  She nodded. “Maybe I’ll end up doing that full-time. If I can save some money, maybe I’ll try and get into breeding one of these days.” She sipped at her Coke, then asked, “Do I want to know about your parents?”

  “No!” Justin exclaimed. “God no! Let’s see . . . I think you’d already moved here when my mom came out of the closet.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Lindsey’s eyes got big. “That must have been fun.”

  “Yeah, right,” Justin said. “Somebody shoot me quick if I ever set out to discover myself.” He turned his mother’s favorite phrase into a curse.

  Lindsey didn’t ask about his father. The bad news there had been obvious while she still lived in the Valley. After some hesitation, she did ask, “What about you? Are you . . . seeing anybody?”

  Justin had just taken a big bite of jelly donut, so he didn’t have to answer right away. When he did, he did his best to make it sound casual: “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh.” Lindsey looked disappointed, which was flattering. And Justin couldn’t have sounded too casual, because she asked, “Are you serious?”

  “Well, it kinda looks that way,” he admitted. And then, not so much out of politeness as because he didn’t want to think about how he wasn’t seeing Megan right this minute and his older self was, he said, “What about you?”

  Lindsey shook her head. A strand of her short blond hair—she’d worn it longer in high school—fell down onto her nose. She brushed it away with her hand. “Not right now. Not so it matters, anyhow, I mean. I’ve gone with a few guys since I got up here, but nobody I’d want to settle down with. You’re lucky.”

  She sounded wistful again. She also sounded as if she really meant it. She’d never begrudged happiness to anybody else. Justin would have had trouble saying the same thing—he was mad as hell thinking about himself-at-forty having a good time with Megan. And how lucky was he if his older self had to come back from 2018 to try to straighten things out? But Lindsey didn’t—couldn’t—know about that, of course.

  He finished the donut in a couple of big bites. “I better get going. I have to be at work before too long.” He could almost feel his nose getting longer, but the lie gave him an excuse to get away.

  “Okay.” Lindsey stood up, too. “It was great to see you. I’m glad you’re doing so well.” She sounded as if she really meant that, too. Nope, not a mean bone in her body. She gave him another hug, this one a little more constrained than the one when they first ran into each other. “Listen, if you ever want to just talk or anything, I’m in the book.” She made a face. “I sorta wish I wasn’t, but I am. I get more damn telemarketers than you can shake a stick at.”

  “Always at dinnertime, too,” Justin said, and she nodded. “They ought to do something about ’em.” He didn’t know who they were or what they could do, but that didn’t stop him from complaining. He headed for the door. “So long.”

  “So long, Justin.” Lindsey followed, but more slowly, making it plain she wasn’t going to come with him once they got outside. He headed for his car. Lindsey walked in the direction of the Wherehouse he’d already found wanting. He looked back toward her once. She was looking toward him. They both smiled and waved. Justin pulled out his keys, unlocked the Toyota, and slid inside. Lindsey went into the Wherehouse. Justin drove back to the Valley. For some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, he didn’t feel so bad once he got there.

  He kept feeling halfway decent, or even a little better than halfway decent, for a while afterwards. The driving need to call up either his older self or Megan and find out how things were going went away. What that amounted to, of course, was finding out whether anybody in the whole wide world cared if he was alive—and a good-sized fear the answer was no. Lindsey Fletcher cared. Justin d
idn’t think of it in those terms—on a conscious level, he hardly thought of it at all—but that was what it added up to.

  And so, over about the next ten days, he found things to do and places to go that let him kill time without seeming to be doing nothing but killing time. He drove over to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which had gone from the coolest place in the world to semi–ghost town in one fell swoop after the ’94 quake. He beat the parking hassles at the new Getty Museum looming over the San Diego Freeway by taking a cab there—spending my older self’s money, he thought, feeling half virtuous and half so there! He found a pretty good Japanese restaurant, Omino’s, on Devonshire near Canoga. It’d be a good place to take Megan once himself-at-forty got the hell back to 2018, where he belonged.

  “Superstrings,” Justin muttered in the apartment that wasn’t his. He’d fought his way through his physics classes; he couldn’t say much more than that. He wished he knew more. His older self did, dammit. That was definitely something to think about when he planned his schedule for his senior year.

  Before so very long, though, he started muttering other, more incendiary, things. His decent mood didn’t last, not least because he didn’t fully understand what had caused it in the first place. The apartment in the Yachtsman started feeling like a prison cell again. Going out stopped being fun. Minutes crawled past on hands and knees.

  Justin thought about calling his older self to complain: he thought about it for a good second and a half, as a matter of fact. Then he laughed a bitter laugh that lasted a lot longer. He knew just what his older self would say. Live with it. He could tell himself that and save the price of a phone call. It wasn’t quite fuck off and die, but close enough for government work.

  Besides, he didn’t really want to talk to himself-at-forty. He wanted to talk to Megan. His older self had given him all sorts of reasons why that wasn’t a good idea. Justin had only one reason why it was: he was going out of his tree because he couldn’t. Eventually, that swamped everything his older self had said.

  He felt as if he’d just pulled off a jailbreak when he dialed her number. Her father answered the phone. “Hi, Mr. Tricoupis,” he said happily. “Can I talk to Megan, please?”

  Instead of saying Sure or Hang on a second or anything like that, Megan’s father answered, “Well, I don’t know, Justin. I’ll see if she wants to talk to you.”

  I’ll see if she wants to talk to you? Justin thought. What the hell’s going on here? But he couldn’t even ask, because a clunking noise meant Mr. Tricoupis had put the phone down. He could only wait.

  After what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than half a minute, Megan said, “Hello?” He needed no more than the one word to hear that she didn’t sound happy.

  But he felt something close to delirious joy at hearing her voice. “Hi!” he burbled. “How you doing?”

  Another pause. Then, very carefully, Megan said, “Justin, didn’t I tell you last night not to call here for a while? Didn’t I say that?”

  He knew what that meant. It meant his older self wasn’t as goddamn smart as he thought he was. By the look of things, it also meant he’d have to bail himself-at-forty out instead of the other way round. He wondered if he could. He and Megan hadn’t had any great big fights, which meant he had no sure feel for how to fix one.

  Silly seemed a good idea. “Duh,” he said, the standard idiot-noise of the late ’90s, and then, “My big mouth.” That wasn’t just an apology; it was also the title of an Oasis song Megan liked.

  “Your big mouth is right,” she said, but a little of the hard edge left her voice—either that or wishful thinking was running away with Justin. She wasn’t going to let him down easy, though; she went on, “Do you have any idea how far over the line you were? Any idea at all?”

  “Definitely maybe,” he answered: an Oasis album title that had the added virtue of keeping him off the hook.

  He wasn’t sure Megan had noticed the first title he used, but she definitely noticed the second; he heard her snort. “You’re funny now,” she said, as if fighting to stay mad. “You weren’t funny last night after the movie, believe me you weren’t.”

  Which movie? Justin wondered. He could hardly ask; he was supposed to know. He couldn’t even waste any more time cursing his older self, not when he was trying to jolly Megan back into a good mood. “Charmless man, that’s me,” he said. It wasn’t just him—it was also a track on a recent Blur CD.

  “Justin . . .” But Megan was fighting back laughter now. “What am I supposed to do about you?”

  “Roll with it, my legendary girlfriend,” Justin said: one Oasis song, one from Pulp. “I’m just a killer for your love. Advert.” Two from Blur. He didn’t know how long he could keep it up, but he was having fun while it lasted.

  With that, Megan gave up the fight and giggled. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I didn’t think you could do anything to make me forget last night, but you did. How did you manage?”

  “Only tongue will tell,” he answered gravely. “Worked a miracle.” That set Megan off again. She recognized Trash Can Sinatras titles, sure enough, and there probably weren’t three other people in the San Fernando Valley who would have.

  “I’ll see you soon, Justin,” she said, and hung up.

  But she wouldn’t be seeing him, dammit. She’d be seeing his older self. Justin started to call his old apartment to tell himself-at-forty what he thought of him, but held off. He didn’t see what good it would do. He wasn’t quite ready to throw his older self out of his place on his ear, and nothing short of that would make a nickel’s worth of difference. I’ll wait, he thought. For a little while.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. He hurried into the bedroom from the kitchen, hoping it was Megan. He’d just picked up the phone when he remembered she didn’t have the number here. By then, he was already saying, “Hello?”

  “Oh, good. You’re home.” His older self sounded half disappointed Justin hadn’t walked in front of a truck.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Justin answered, still wishing it were Megan. Throwing himself-at-forty out on his ear suddenly looked more attractive. He went on, “No, you’re home. I’m stuck here.” He looked around the little bedroom, feeling like a trapped animal again.

  His older self had gone into dictator mode: “Didn’t I tell you to lay low till I was done here? 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,” Justin said. “She was my girl first, you know. I’ve got a right to talk with her.” As talking to Lindsey Fletcher out in the wilds of Simi Valley had, it reminded him he was alive.

  But himself-at-forty didn’t want to hear any of that. Maybe he wasn’t a dictator; maybe he was just a grownup talking down to a kid. Whatever he was, he sure sounded like somebody convinced he knew it all: “Not if you want her to keep being your girl, you don’t. You’re the one who’s going to screw it up, remember?”

  “That’s what you keep telling me.” Justin was getting sick of hearing it, too. “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.”

  “Nobody has all the answers.” His older self sounded as if he believed that. Justin didn’t; like The X-Files, he was convinced the truth was out there, provided he could find it. And then, throwing gasoline on the fire, his older self added, “If you think you’ve got more of them than I do, you’re full of shit.”

  That did it. Justin wanted to turn his head real fast to see if he had smoke coming out of his ears. “You want to be careful how you talk to me,” he ground out, biting off each word. “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.”

  If that didn’t scare the crap out of himself-at-forty, Justin didn’t k
now what would. But if it did, his older self didn’t show it, damn him. Instead, he kicked back with both feet, like a mule: “Yeah, go ahead. Screw up your life for good. Keep going like this and you will.”

  And that scared the crap out of Justin. Himself-at-forty had to know it would. It was the only weapon he had, but it was a nuke. Justin tried not to let on that he knew it, saying, “You sound pretty screwed up now. What have I got to lose?”

  Maybe, for once, he got through to himself-at-forty, because his older self, also for once, stopped trying to browbeat him and started trying to explain: “I had something good, and I let it slip through my fingers. You wreck what I’m doing now, you’ll go through life without knowing what a good thing was.” And then he trotted out the ICBMs again. “You want that? Just keep sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. You want to end up with Megan or not?”

  There it was. Justin did want that. He wanted it more than anything else in the world, and he couldn’t let on that he didn’t. If himself-at-forty was bluffing, he’d just got away with it. “All right,” Justin said, though it was anything but all right, and he didn’t think he sounded as if it were. “I’ll back off—for now.”

  He got the last word by hanging up. Then he masturbated again. It made him feel good, but it didn’t come close to making him feel better.

  He rented Titanic and watched it several times over the next few days, which certainly went a long way toward keeping him out of circulation. He wasn’t watching it for the romance. Christ, no. Jack died. He wanted his life with Megan to go on and on, even if he couldn’t stand Celine Dion.

  What he watched obsessively was the way the enormous liner took on water and sank after it hit the iceberg. Here in this apartment that wasn’t his, as far out of the loop as he could be, he felt he was taking on water, too.

  Running into Lindsey Fletcher, sitting down with her and eating messy jelly donuts and talking, had let him believe for quite a while that he wasn’t alone in the world. He cared about Megan a lot more, but talking with her on the phone didn’t satisfy his people jones nearly as long. For one thing, talking on the phone was like looking at a picture of a great dinner—pretty, yeah, but not the real thing.