Someday Jennifer

by Risto Pakarinen

  “Hold it! Take the guitar!” Tina said, her phone in hand. “This is too good! Pose like a boss . . . the Boss!”

  Click. Click.

  “Perfect.”

  I morphed the Springsteen look—via a trench coat and fingerless gloves—into Breakfast Club bad boy John Bender. I punched the air and held the pose, imagining the credits rolling over my liberated, freeze-framed image.

  We went on like that for a while, adding Footloose—high-waisted jeans, tank top, and T-shirt—and two different Miami Vice looks featuring pastel shirts. She held a Clark Griswold–style sweater in front of me.

  “Now, tie this around your neck,” she said. “Obviously.”

  I was beginning to worry that she was taking this a little too seriously.

  She told me to go back behind the boxes one more time and wait. I heard her huffing and puffing, opening boxes and lifting bags while humming the last song on the mix-tape: “Automatic” by the Pointer Sisters. Finally, a pile of clothes sailed over the boxes and landed on top of me.

  I sifted through it, pulling out a lavender T-shirt, a white-checkered short-sleeve shirt, high-cut Guess blue jeans, suspenders, Nike sneakers, a Guess two-tone denim jacket, a Casio digital watch, mirrored sunglasses, and a burnt-orange down vest.

  There was even a pair of Calvin Klein underpants.

  “The Marty McFly,” Tina said with a grand finality.

  I put it all on, and when I stepped out, Tina shrieked with laughter—not mocking me, but amazed. I caught my reflection in the dusty mirror. The jeans didn’t quite do up at the top, and the hair wasn’t right, but apart from that it was pretty much spot on.

  “Well, that was fun,” Tina said eventually. “But I should be getting home. I totally lost track of time.”

  I laughed and thanked her for coming.

  “I’m so glad to hear you laugh,” she said as I changed back into my old (new) clothes. “I told you the makeover would help. Maybe you just needed to have some fun. I mean, I get it. You’re probably lonely, and you know, you’re at a certain age . . . Don’t forget that you can always call me.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t do anything silly,” she said. “Do I have to worry about you?”

  “No, no,” I said, swallowing an unexpected lump in my throat. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Anything else I should know about?”

  I thought about the letters in my back pocket, but said nothing.

  She patted my back and told me to call her anytime I wanted to talk. And that maybe Tim and I should play squash or something.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Try not to worry so much,” she said.

  After Tina left, I cracked another beer, took a sip, and stared at the photo of Jennifer. I folded it in half. A casual, almost accidental fold, so that Sami was now facing the wall. I wagged my finger at her. “You know what? You’re something else.”

  I folded the photo in with the letters and headed back up to my apartment.

  Chapter 11

  All Night Long (All Night)

  THE HOUR SPENT with Tina had put me in a better mood. Yes, she was bossy, and she was definitely a know-it-all, but she did care for me. Also, goofing around with her like that reminded me of some of the fun times we’d had growing up. The fondness threatened to overwhelm me for a moment—or maybe that was just the beer.

  I put Hanna’s letter—my Time Machine—on my desk, next to a new can of beer, and logged on to Facebook. I got the usual warm tingle when I saw the red notification bell, but rather than instantly clicking it, the first thing I did was unfriend my former boss/client. Which left me with 127 friends, so far, in this lifetime.

  The notification, when I did click on it, told me that Tina Eksell-Smythe had tagged me in a photo.

  Wow. What happened here? LOL. #throwback.

  She’d made a composite photo that featured me as a seventeen-year-old on the left, and me as “Springsteen,” circa forty-five minutes ago, on the right. The teenage me was also wearing faded blue jeans, a (tucked-in) plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and a bandana, but he wasn’t holding a guitar. And the man on the right? Well, apart from the mean overbite, he didn’t seem to have much in common with the Boss.

  I let my cursor hover over Like and selected Haha. A laughing emoji appeared below the photo. To my slight dismay, I noticed that fifteen of Tina’s friends had already “liked” the picture.

  I scrolled.

  One of my Facebook friends, a Canadian wannabe triathlete, was addicted to Facebook tests: “What Cheese Are You Most Like?” “What Tree Represents Your Character?” In the latest one, she’d spent several of her numbered minutes on this Earth getting an algorithm to tell her which of the Seven Dwarfs she would be. She’d gotten Dopey. She seemed proud of the result, and for good reason. She was kind of dopey.

  I quickly flew by a set of baby photos and a link to a blog post by another friend. He’d written about how becoming a vegan had changed his life, which was great for him, but with a zeal that would have made a fundamentalist missionary feel lazy, he seemed determined to convert the whole world to a plant-based diet. I felt a bit sorry for the hopelessness of his cause, so out of pity I gave his post a “like.” Then I worried that Facebook’s algorithms would start filling my timeline with ads for meat substitutes and thought about “un-liking” it, but then I worried that he might be one of those guys who’s set up push notifications, and so gets an alert on his phone every time someone likes something, and then I worried that I might be worrying about stupid things. And then I composed a status update about the pointlessness of worrying about worrying, but then I worried nobody would like it and deleted it. I finished my beer, crushed the can, and sauntered to the fridge for another, vowing to never go on social media again.

  I wondered why it is that people—or the people I followed, anyway—tended to only share positive news about themselves, and only link to negative news clips and articles of doom and gloom.

  It had been fun in the beginning, back when I’d first joined Facebook and you could only have statuses like Peter Eksell is . . . at the office and Peter Eksell is . . . not at the office and Peter Eksell is . . . smiling at the office, but as the platform had improved and adapted so that more of life could be posted on it, it had turned into a cause of stress and distress—and yet, I couldn’t stay away.

  I scrolled back up to the Seven Dwarfs test. I got Bashful.

  I quickly got tired of my timeline. I only seemed to see the same dozen people, and they were always doing the same old things, mostly eating fancy dinners and working out, all of which had to be documented in the tiniest detail, from the number of calories burned to the ingredients of their dark-chocolate mousse.

  I went back to Tina’s photo of me and changed the Haha to a Wow, which replaced the laughing emoji with one that had a wide-open mouth. I closed the Facebook tab.

  My homepage was Google News, and as I cracked the next beer, I scanned the headlines. My mother always said there’s nothing in the dark that’s not there in the light but, to me, the news always seemed more depressing at night. Violence in the Middle East, a mass shooting in the United States, a tennis player’s racist tweet, and a Russian submarine in the English Channel. Same old same old. Russia news somehow always stuck out; living in Finland, the big bear on the other side of the border could not be ignored. Social media had brought that issue a little too close to home again. Literally.

  Tina had told me not to worry so much. Easier said than done.

  I glanced at the clock in the upper-right-hand corner of my laptop, squinting so I could see straight. It was 11:20, the time for great ideas, and I got one. Hanna had mentioned the fun she’d had tracking down my classmates. And here I was, with the internet at my fingertips. The largest accumulation of information ever amassed in human history, and how was I taking advantage of it? I was scrolling through kitten pictures.

  I punched “Mikael Lund” into Facebook’s search window. None o
f the photos that popped up with the results looked right, and of those that could have been possibilities, none shared mutual friends with me, which seemed unlikely. Perhaps (just perhaps!) Mikke didn’t have a Facebook profile. Some people, I hear, do not.

  So I tried Google—and 0.52 seconds later, I had almost 600,000 hits. The first-page results (does anyone ever look at the second page?) included links to several LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. One Mikael Lund seemed to be a professor in Sweden, another a priest in Michigan.

  It was impossible to know which one of the thousands was my old high-school buddy, although I had a pretty good idea it wasn’t the priest. After all, Mikke had been sent home from school for his “horny Jesus” Halloween outfit. Then again, people change.

  I clicked on Images, hoping I’d recognize Mikke if I saw a photo of him. Another half a second later my screen was filled with male faces, mostly white, mostly European, but none that looked like that crazy, big-haired friend of mine.

  But then, suddenly, there he was. His big cheeky smile, his face fatter than it had been, and—Tina had nailed it!—his head bald! I clicked on the photo and it took me through to a website, the homepage for a church in Michigan. Well, I never.

  I raised my beer and toasted the photo on my screen. The Church of Holy Rock was a denomination I hadn’t heard of, but it was obvious that Mikke had done well for himself. According to the site, he was the head priest. Next to his photo was a PayPal button people could use to donate money for the men and women on a mission from God. I never understood why, if God moves in mysterious ways, he didn’t move some mysterious money into the church coffers. “But what do I know?” I mumbled.

  I spent the next forty-five minutes trying to remember the names of my former Kumpunotko friends and then googling them. Total 80s FM was playing Queen’s “Friends Will Be Friends.” I was becoming convinced that the station’s computer algorithm was stalking me.

  My search results were interesting. I had known a couple of goofballs and a girl who was too shy to speak in class, but when I googled them, I found a celebrity chef, a math professor, and a start-up guru.

  And yes, they did live in Dubai, Scotland, and Thailand.

  “Good for them,” I muttered.

  It did sting a little that I was sitting in a tiny apartment in Helsinki, barely two hours from Kumpunotko. I gave my head a shake to dislodge the negative thoughts. No, I wasn’t an international jetsetter, but I was still relatively successful. Well, I had been. Until that afternoon. And while I wasn’t technically unemployed, since I had my own company, the fact of the matter was that I didn’t have a source of income.

  “So they moved? Big deal.” More muttering.

  Where had the time gone? How had I gone from the person Jennifer thought had all the answers, the guy who was going places, to this guy—this guy who couldn’t fit into his favourite jeans anymore, sitting alone at home on a Friday night drinking beer in his underwear?

  A movie tagline for the story of my life would have been something like “He was here? Who knew?”

  It was midnight and I was wound up! I was also nearing the end of my six-pack. There was a bottle in the freezer, vodka that I’d been holding on to for a special occasion, and it was calling my name.

  I found a few more old schoolmates on Facebook and scrolled through the updates of their glamorous lives: their summer cottages in Lapland, mansions in Florida; their honour-roll-student children, their flourishing businesses, and oh, all the fancy food they ate.

  I clicked back to Mikke’s church site but couldn’t find a phone number anywhere, so I tried one that was listed in the metadata on another of the Google results. That Mikael Lund had definitely not gone to Kumpunotko High, and he let me know it. Apparently, he had gone to bed, though. “It’s the middle of the night, idiot,” he said, and hung up on me.

  I flipped back to Facebook and changed the astonished emoji underneath Tina’s photo of me to a basic Like. Thumbs up, everybody. Ironically. Twenty-seven people had now reacted to the photo, and a few too many of them were crying with laughter.

  I slumped on the sofa.

  Hours before, the Time Machine had made me euphoric. Life had shown me a glimpse of happiness and then, when I’d bent down to look at it, had given me a kick in the ass. All at once, I was frantic. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to do something. Something had to change! Tina had said I should be proactive, and she was right. I could not waste another day/week/month just going through the motions. Tomorrow was the first day of the rest of my life. My future!

  The only problem was that I didn’t know what to do. There were so many signs, but I didn’t know where they were pointing. Was Hanna’s letter—no, my letter—important, or just a fun thing? What about the photo of Jennifer? Why had I held on to it for so long? Why had I found it on the same day the letter arrived? Was that a coincidence, or some kind of cosmic message? And what about the clothes? Tina’s visit? Her photo? I was confused, and sad, and a little bit lost.

  There was nothing else for it.

  I poured myself a generous slug of the vodka, pulled my Back to the Future trilogy DVD box off the shelf, and inserted the first disc into my DVD player. I turned off Total 80s FM—which, in the style of a good human DJ, had dipped from high-energy disco to smoochy slow dances—and turned up the sound on my surround system. I sat back and watched my favourite movie of all time. My guide to life, if you will.

  I know people speak in hyperbole these days, but Back to the Future truly did change my life. It made me believe that anything was possible and that nothing was set in stone. That every day, I could change the course of history and create my own future. My grades got better after I saw it, and I grew almost ten centimetres that summer—though that may have been just a coincidence.

  And I did believe that anything was possible. I truly did. I just never did anything about it. Because I also believed—as everybody spent my childhood telling me—that I was destined for great things. And if you’re destined, it’s going to happen anyway, right?

  Right?

  I knew Back to the Future by heart. I could have performed the entire movie by myself, and often did. All by myself. As I did that night, sitting on a worn-down couch in a Marty McFly outfit my sister had put together (minus the restrictive pants, but with the Calvin Klein underwear).

  Sure, I was a little heavier than back in the day, and maybe I’d never had a talent for skateboarding or guitar playing. I definitely ate poorly and drank too much. I didn’t sleep well or enough, and that showed too. And yet, none of that mattered when I was back in Hill Valley.

  I picked up my guitar from the floor and entered Doc’s lab. I grabbed hold of the end of my couch as Marty gave himself a free ride holding onto a pick-up truck. I delivered a poor rendition of Huey Lewis and the News’s “Power of Love” at the audition, and I kicked dirty laundry off the floor as I walked with Jennifer afterwards, miserable. I sat on the end of my sofa and gazed far into the horizon and slurred, “Someday, Jennifer. Someday.”

  That’s how I acted out the whole movie, with certain modifications made along the way. At Lou’s Café, I didn’t get a Tab or a Pepsi Free. I had another vodka. As Doc and Marty and Jennifer flew away in the time machine, and the promise of To be continued . . . appeared on the screen, I was hunched in the corner of the couch, an empty glass in my hand, staring at the rolling credits.

  All I wanted—and surely it was not too much to ask—was a real time machine.

  I wanted a Doc, and a DeLorean, so that I could go back in time and get my Jennifer.

  So that I could roll up in 1986 Kumpunotko and grab young Peter, in the summer before he finished high school, and give him a good shake. So I could tell him how to get it all right, how to make all the decisions I’d made, but better. So that when I woke up on the sofa tomorrow I wouldn’t be this lonely old loser anymore. Sunlight would stream through the window, and Jennifer would bring me a coffee and chide me for staying up late watching sil
ly old movies again, and the kids would run in and jump on me, and we’d all laugh and laugh in soft focus about nothing much.

  I flipped the TV off, wiped my eyes.

  “Why can’t you, though?” a voice asked.

  It was my voice.

  “Because I don’t have a Doc Brown, or a time machine,” I replied.

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. I need the flux capata . . . flux capacitator . . . flux capacitor. That’s how you time travel!”

  “But is that the only way?”

  I opened my mouth to argue with myself, but then I realized that I had a point. Which is why, right there and then, I decided that I was going to become a time traveller—however I could, whatever it took.

  I just didn’t need all the gloom of my 2016 life. Nothing was keeping me here. I was free. I could do whatever I wanted. There was no reason whatsoever that I couldn’t go back to a happier time, a time when I’d had friends and love and been a superstar DJ. I picked up a piece of paper and wrote Memo to self at the top of the page, surprised at my inability to form the letters properly.

  “You’re drunk,” I told myself. “Drunker than you think. Plus it’s late, and dark. Your mind’s playing tricks on you.”

  Silence.

  “Shut up,” I replied. “This is a great idea.”

  I poised my pen, ready to write out my plan. I turned my mental amplifier up to full blast, knowing full well that the first power chord was going to blow me away.

  I couldn’t wait.

  Chapter 12

  Abracadabra

  WHEN I WOKE UP—or maybe “came to” is a better way to describe what happened the next morning—I could hardly move. The sun was beaming down on my face, which meant that it was already afternoon, and I was still on the sofa. As soon as I moved my eyes, I felt a pain like someone had taken a knife and cut through the middle of my head. Thinking? That made my head hurt even more.