If You Were Here

by Stephanie Taylor

  The doctor helped Lisa to her feet again, steering her into a chair next to Daniel’s bed.

  “We think he can,” the doctor explained. “There’s research to support the idea that comatose patients can both hear and sometimes process the sounds and words that go on around them. We’d like Daniel to hear us speaking positively about his recovery, and—ideally—we’d keep talk of the incident to a minimum.”

  The very mention of the word incident was enough to incite rage in her. “Oh, the incident? Is that what we’re calling it now when a child brings two guns to school and—”

  The doctor had her by the elbow and on her feet in an instant. He dragged her across the room and through the doorway before he spoke. Lisa had to take two small steps to his every one in order to keep up with him.

  “Mrs. Girch,” he said once the door was closed behind them. “Talking about what happened yesterday will not help Daniel at this point. All it will do is cause him anxiety, assuming that he can hear us. He may not know anything about what’s going on, and if we fill his head with stories of violence and death, we’re essentially pushing him deeper into the void. We don’t want that. We want to bring him back to us.”

  “Oh, so me being angry about some kid shooting my son in the fucking head is going to send him towards the light?” she shouted angrily, pulling away from the doctor again. “You think he’ll hear my voice and want to die, is that what you’re saying?”

  “What I’m saying,” the doctor said carefully, “is that we don’t know. We have no idea what’s going on in his head, and we want to keep sending messages of hope and love, not of terror and mayhem.”

  She clenched her jaw and exhaled. The nurse from the front desk walked towards them, handing over Lisa’s purse like she was offering her a platter of roadkill. She turned away immediately, ready to avoid any confrontation with a mother who was clearly grief-stricken and filled with rage.

  “Okay,” Lisa agreed. “I’ll keep it happy and light. Just let me see him.”

  The doctor opened the door, following closely behind Lisa in case she fell again or needed to be pulled from the room. But this time she approached the bed tentatively, putting a hand on Daniel’s knee like she was afraid it might startle him.

  “Hi, baby,” she whispered, her eyes welling up with tears. The mascara she’d put on the day before had clumped and run, and she brushed at the flakes of black that clung to the thin skin beneath her eyes. With the back of one hand, she wiped at her nose. “Mama’s here.”

  The lights in the room cast a sterile glow over the scene, and the monitors continued to beep in time with Daniel’s pulse, with his oxygen intake, with his IV drip. The doctor backed up a few steps and retreated, leaving his clipboard behind on the foot of the bed.

  13

  January 9, 1986

  Video Killed the Radio Star

  I told my grandma that Roger was coming over to do homework with me, and she made me promise to clean up any messes we made and lock up before I went to bed. Andy was out again, of course, and my mom had to be up in her room and in bed by eight, so I sat around on the couch and watched The Cosby Show until Roger came over.

  He rang the bell at eight-thirty and I switched off the episode where Denise and Vanessa Huxtable end up fighting over a sweater. I’d already seen it anyway. As the screen faded to black, I stared at the remote in my hand, wishing there was a button for Netflix. I’d have killed to watch an episode of Shameless right then.

  “I missed dessert for this, so it better be good,” Roger said, stepping into the front hall and taking off his jacket. He tossed it in the general direction of the couch and missed. It slid to the floor.

  We took a bag of Chips Ahoy and a carton of milk up to my room.

  “So what did you want to show me?” he asked, eating two cookies at once. Now that I had him there, I wasn’t sure how to start. The thought of trying to explain an iPhone to a kid who still used a pencil to re-roll his cassette tapes when they got eaten by his Walkman was a little daunting.

  Roger took another cookie. “Spit it out, bro. I’m dying here.”

  I walked over to my closet and slid open the door. My iPhone was under the floorboard in there, and my palms were sweating as I contemplated taking it out. I wanted to show him, but I had no idea where to start.

  “So,” I said, cracking my knuckles nervously. “There’s this thing…”

  “That you want to show me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Roger waved a hand at me. “Just take it out already.” We made eye contact and both started to smirk. “Okay, not like that. Just hurry up. I’m going to eat all your cookies.” Just to prove it, he took two more and shoved them into his mouth as he fell back onto my waterbed.

  The floorboard moved aside easily and I stared down at the phone. With a deep breath, I took it out and held it in my palm.

  “Roger,” I said. “I trust you.”

  He stopped chewing and looked at me. “Thank you.” His mouth was full of cookies and his words were muffled. “Now get on with it.”

  I kept my hand curled around the phone. “I have something I want to show you, but it’s going to blow your mind.”

  Roger gave me a patronizing smile. “Daniel,” he said, “I seriously doubt that you could be holding anything in your hand that would actually blow my mind. But go ahead and try.”

  My stomach clenched up in fear as I held my phone out and opened my hand. “This,” I said seriously, “is an iPhone.”

  Roger stared at me. He glanced at the black phone in my hand and then looked back at me with a blank expression. “An iPhone? What the hell is that?”

  “It’s like a little computer,” I said. I pushed the home button and the screen lit up.

  “Wait,” Roger said. He tossed the bag of Chips Ahoy onto my bed and three cookies rolled out and landed on the carpet. “Show me that.” He was up and standing in front of me within seconds. A frown creased his forehead.

  I let go of the fear that I’d been feeling since we’d walked into my room and unlocked the phone. “So this is the home screen,” I said, showing him the apps that were lined up there. “And these little squares are all your apps.”

  “Apps?” He reached out a tentative hand like he wanted to touch the phone. “What is this thing?”

  “Well, it’s a phone,” I said, touching the phone icon and pulling up a list of the people I’d recently spoken to. “But we can’t call these people, because…well, we can’t.” I wasn’t ready to tell him yet that the people in my call list hadn’t even been born in 1986. That most of their parents—like my own mother—were still running around on playgrounds and being tucked into bed by their parents at night. “And this app here,” I said, touching my iTunes button, “this one plays music.”

  Roger held up a hand and took a step back. “Wait, where did you get this?” His voice was low and serious.

  “At the Apple store,” I said.

  Roger made a face. “The Apple store? Is that at the mall?”

  “Yeah. Well, it will be. They sell laptops, phones, watches…”

  He looked lost. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “Anyway, this is my music. What do you want to hear?” I pulled up a list of songs and scrolled through it, the titles and artists spinning past his eyes in a blur.

  Roger finally reached out to touch the phone, taking it in his hand and flipping it over. He looked at the back of it, then turned it sideways and checked out how thin it was. “What’s the trick?” he asked. “Where do you put the cassette?”

  “No cassettes necessary. Or CDs.”

  “I don’t even have any CDs,” Roger said. “Do you know how much a CD player costs?”

  I had no idea how much that would set me back in 1986, so I just shrugged. “Well, it won’t play CDs anyway.”

  “Okay, I’m ready for this magic trick.” He handed back the phone and folded his arms in an ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ kind of move. “Do you have any Huey Lewis?”

  “
Who?” I started scrolling again.

  “Huey Lewis and the News. Come on, dude.”

  “Ehhh, no.” I’d never even heard of them. “How about this?” I chose “Don’t” by Bryson Tiller and the song started playing out loud.

  “Whoa,” Roger said, making a face. “No headphones?” The beat came straight out of my phone as I held it in my hand.

  “No headphones,” I said. We listened to the song together for a minute.

  Roger sat back on my bed and the waves rocked back and forth as he got settled. “I’m confused,” he said. “By this weird music, but also by this little computer thing that you say is also a phone.” Roger looked at my phone like it couldn’t be trusted. “It’s not even plugged into anything.”

  “Yeah, it only needs to plug in to charge.” I turned the phone so he could see the place where I plugged in the charger. “Other than that, it runs on battery power.”

  “Not just that,” Roger said scratching his cheek. “But, like…how does it work? I don’t get it.”

  “Okay,” I sat next to him and then scooted back on the bed so that I was leaning against the wall behind it. “So this guy named Steve Jobs took all the things you could ever imagine that you might want, and he crammed everything into this little box. It took a while—like, his first attempts weren’t as sleek as this one—but the iPhone does everything.”

  “Plays music, calls people,” Roger said, parroting back to me what I’d already told him.

  “Way more than that.” I took a deep breath. “Imagine that you can not only call people, but send them messages that fly through space and pop up on the screen of their own phones within seconds. And if you want to call them and see their faces, you can do that, too.”

  “Wait—like you can make a video call? The way they did in Blade Runner?”

  “Yeah, you can do that. And you can look up the answers to pretty much anything you can think of. You just have to be connected to the internet.”

  “Dude, that’s really bitchin.” Roger’s eyes looked a little glazed, and I realized that I was opening a whole Pandora’s box of potential explaining by mentioning the internet.

  “Anyway,” I went on, glossing over that bit, “you just type in a question or a topic and you’ll have millions of answers and photos at your fingertips.”

  “Show me.”

  “Well, I can’t. We’re missing some important infrastructure here, so it won’t work.”

  Roger closed his eyes for a long second and I could see the wheels turning in his head. A part of him clearly thought that I was bullshitting him.

  “Let me show you something,” I said, climbing off the bed and holding my phone in my hand. I opened the photo app and switched it to video before I hit ‘record.’

  “Why are you pointing that thing at me?” Roger asked.

  “Say something. Tell me about today.”

  *

  Roger shook his head. “What about today? About how Peabody made us run outside when it was so freaking cold that my nuts almost shriveled up and fell off?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. And who did I talk to after school?”

  Roger rolled his eyes. “The amazing Jenny. You finally pulled your head out of your ass and asked her out. Congratulations. Golf claps.” Roger clapped his hands together slowly. There was mocking sarcasm all over his face.

  “Perfect,” I said, turning off the video. “Now watch this.” I went over and sat next to him again on the waterbed and hit play. His face popped up on the screen.

  “Whoa.” Roger’s breath stopped as he watched his own image, wearing the clothes he was wearing this very second, sitting on my bed next to the same bag of cookies that were showing up on the phone screen. The Roger on my phone started to talk, repeating back word for word the things Roger had just said right there in my room.

  He jumped up and looked at me like I’d threatened to punch him. “How did you do that?” He pointed at the phone. “How did you get a video of me right now without a video camera?”

  I knew for a fact that any video taken in 1986 would have been done on some sort of a boxy, handheld contraption that you’d have rested on your shoulder. It probably would have had an external microphone and a clunky VHS tape that you would have inserted before turning it on and taping. The fact that I’d bypassed that particular video relic and captured a clean, clear image of Roger within seconds had to be confusing for him.

  “That’s part of the beauty of the iPhone,” I said, feeling for a second like a salesman at the Apple store. “It takes amazing pictures and videos, and you store them directly in your phone—or to your iCloud.” I mentally kicked myself again. Explaining the iCloud was more than I wanted to do at nine o’clock on a Thursday night. Fortunately, Roger was still hung up on the video of himself.

  “Can I watch it again?” he asked, taking a hesitant step towards me.

  “Sure. Let’s watch it.” I hit ‘play’ again and let the video of him run. He never tore his eyes from the screen.

  “You wanna hold it?” I held the phone out to him. “Why don’t you choose a song or something?”

  Roger looked at me like I was offering him a syringe full of heroin. I could see the torment on his face as he tried to decide whether this little device was the coolest thing he’d ever seen or the work of the devil himself. After a second’s hesitation, he reached for the phone.

  “So I go to…this thing here?” He pointed at the iTunes app on the screen.

  “Yeah, touch that.”

  “Just…touch it?” His eyes flicked up at me, his finger hovering over the screen.

  “Right. Touch it and open the app. Then we’ll go to my list of songs and you can choose something.” He opened iTunes and the songs popped up. “Go ahead,” I said, nodding at him. “Your choice.”

  Roger used his finger to drag the list down and I watched as he passed by Drake, Korn, and Nine Inch Nails. He stopped at the Police and touched “Roxanne.” Sting’s distinctive wail came from my phone.

  “My first choice,” Roger said, looking more like himself and less like I was scaring the crap out of him, “is always going to be a song about a hooker.”

  “As it should be,” I said, smiling at him.

  Roger rubbed his forehead and his temples. “I guess my next question has to be why this feels so…futuristic. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  He’d led me right to the spot where I needed to be, and my nerves kicked up again as I considered the potential outcomes here. If I told him the truth, he could either believe me or think I was a complete basketcase. It could have really gone either way at that point.

  “So,” I started, watching as he picked up my phone and looked through my iTunes again. “I have to tell you something, man, and I need you to trust me.”

  Roger looked up from my phone. “I trust you.”

  “No, I mean really—like the way I trust you.”

  “Daniel. How long have we known each other?” He looked at me incredulously.

  I didn’t have the answer to that, so I just forged ahead. “I woke up on New Year’s Day in this bedroom,” I said, looking around at the walls and the posters and furniture that I’d only just gotten used to seeing.

  “Which is a miracle in and of itself, given how shitfaced you were on New Year’s Eve,” Roger said with a knowing look. I almost felt bad about what I was about to say.

  “Yeah,” I laughed. “True. But it was stranger than that, because all I remember before that morning was living in 2016.”

  Roger’s face was blank. It was like he hadn’t heard my words at all.

  “You know what I mean? I was in 2016, and then I woke up in this bedroom and the radio was playing, and that picture was staring at me from the wall.”

  “Christie Brinkley, dude,” Roger said appreciatively as he nodded at the poster of the girl in the purple bikini. “Rad.”

  “Focus,” I said, pointing at my eyes so that Roger would come back to me. “You can look at that ch
ick later.”

  “I could look at her all the time,” he said, but he did as I asked and looked at my face again.

  “Are you hearing me at all?”

  Roger shrugged. “I’m hearing you, but I’m not really getting it. Where’s the punchline?”

  “It’s not a joke. You saw my iPhone. Nothing like that exists in 1986.”

  “Okay, yeah. So I’ve seen this phone, and I’ll admit that it’s pretty out there. But I saw you on New Year’s Eve, Daniel. You weren’t in 2016, you were in my basement, dry humping Jenny on my mom’s old couch.”

  I struggled with my words, unsure how to explain that small inconsistency. Because of course I was in Roger’s basement that night—but not the real me.

  “I can’t explain that part. What I can tell you is this: this is my house. I mean, it’s the house I live in with my mom in 2016.” I looked up at the ceiling and around the room again. “And when I woke up, I heard someone calling me down to breakfast. But when I went down there, the woman in the kitchen wasn’t my mom—it was my grandma.”

  “Ah,” Roger said, making a face like he got it. “Right. So you time traveled back thirty years, and your grandma was in the kitchen making you bacon and eggs.”

  “Exactly! Only it was pancakes,” I said, happy that he understood.

  Roger stood up. “Daniel, your grandma is in Palm Beach. And this story is getting weird.”

  I stood up and blocked the door so that he couldn’t leave, which is what it looked like he might be about to do.

  “No, I’m telling you the truth!” I held out a hand. “My grandma is here right now. And I hadn’t seen her since I was in the 8th grade. That’s when she died,” I said, practically begging him to understand. “And my grandpa has been in a wheelchair for as long as I can remember, but now he’s here, walking around and going for jogs.”

  “Yeah, he does run a lot,” Roger said, looking at me skeptically like he was trying to gauge his chances of getting around me and out the door.

  “And my mom—the woman I know as my mom—is in this house, too,” I said, ready to drop the real bomb on him. “Only she still plays with Barbies and jumps on the furniture.”