by Alan Seeger
On his fourth day of hospitalization (or, as Rick referred to it, incarceration), Rick was starting to feel a little stronger. He’d been able to get up out of the hospital bed and shuffle across the floor to the bathroom, with only moderate assistance from one of the aides, a tall, sun-blonde ‘surfer dude’ type whose name was Ty.
“How you feelin’ today, Mr. Harper?” Ty asked him.
“Little better than it’s been,” Rick told him.
After he was back in bed, the day nurse, Lula, came in to take Rick’s vital signs; blood pressure, pulse, and blood gases. She clipped the oxygen saturation sensor on his index finger, and explained that it was a new method of testing O2 saturation; San Francisco General was, she said, the first hospital in the area to use them. Rick smiled at the idea that the clip-on units were something new; they had been around for as long as he could remember.
~~~~~
Stefanie arrived at about ten o’clock. She had worked the breakfast meal at the shelter; Artie had been there, and had actually sought her out to ask about Rick. He was still relatively monosyllabic, but managed to stammer out, “Stefanie… where’s Ricky?” It was a huge leap from where he’d been just days before.
She had managed to get Artie cleaned up a bit — enough so that, at the least, no one at the hospital would try to run him out, anyway — and brought him with her; she told Rick that she had a surprise for him, and brought Artie in from where he’d been waiting in the hall.
They sat and talked, and it seemed to Stef that the more Rick talked to his dad, the more they both seemed to open up; Artie was gradually beginning to speak three or four words at a time, while Rick, once so angry at his missing father, was opening to him like a flower opening to the sun.
Stefanie and Artie stayed for about an hour, then she told Rick that she was going to take Artie back to the shelter for lunch and to make sure he got signed up for a bed for that night; he still shied away from the idea of sleeping anywhere except the shelter or one of the camps of homeless people that dotted the area. She promised Rick that she’d be back soon after they were finished cleaning up from lunch, and explained that she had the evening shift off, so she would come and eat dinner with him.
Rick told Stefanie and Artie goodbye and settled in to take a nap.
CHAPTER 91
At the offices of ChroNova, the senior staff sat in the HOT6 lab, drinking coffee and discussing different ideas that they had for future projects.
Underlying every word was the universal feeling that they needed to watch out of the corners of their eyes for Rick and Stefanie to return through the swirling Gate.
Seventeen hours had passed since Rick had passed back through to find Stefanie and bring her home.
How long could it take?
CHAPTER 92
Stefanie had checked Artie in, seen to it that his ancient shelter registration was corrected to reflect his true identity — Arthur Harper, rather than Artie Doe — and then pitched in to help with pre-prep for the evening meal.
She had taken three large plastic bags of bread dough out of the chiller to finish rising before leaving the shelter that morning, and had been pleased to see that they had nearly doubled in volume since then. She got a large stack of loaf pans from the storage area, greased them, and prepared a total of a dozen loaves of bread for baking. Rose would put them all into the large ovens an hour before the evening mealtime, and those in attendance would have a rare treat — fresh, warm bread to go with their main dish.
Stef had convinced Arthur to let her help him find a completely new set of clothes from the shelter’s thrift store, and after a hot shower and a shave — neither of which he had done voluntarily in ages — he looked like a totally different person. He acted different as well; gone was the tentative nature of his gaze, the monosyllabic, halting speech. He was still shy and soft spoken, but Stefanie attributed that more to being shy around the woman he’d been casually familiar with, first as a fellow shelter client and then as a shelter employee, for the better part of a year, only to now discover that she was his de facto daughter-in-law.
Stef was still in the process of rolling out loaves of bread when Arthur came to her, standing silently, watching her work.
He looked at him and smiled. “Hi, Artie… Arthur, I mean. Did you need something?”
He gazed back at her and smiled as well. “I just wanted to say thank you,” he said with difficulty.
“Thank me? For what?”
“For making my Ricky a happy man,” he said.
They hugged, and then she got her purse and left for the hospital.
CHAPTER 93
Rick had been asleep when Stefanie had arrived back at the hospital, but awoke soon after; he’d been lightly dozing all afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep, and seemed to sense her presence as soon as she sat down by his bedside.
“Hi, my diamond girl,” he said with a sleepy smile. “You sure do shine up nice.”
She smiled. The way Rick always complimented her on her appearance was one of the things she loved about him.
“How you feeling, my sick little guy?”
“Hey, now,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Not that little. I can show you if you want — all I got on is this hospital gown.”
She smiled wider and shook her head. “You must not be as sick as the doctor says.”
“I’m really feeling a lot better,” Rick replied. “The headaches are gone, the nausea… I just wanna go home.”
“Well, sure you’re feeling better, honey,” Stefanie laughed. “You’re on morphine, and Zofran, and half a dozen other medications I can’t remember. You just need to let them take care of you.”
“You don’t get it, honey,” he said. “I want us both to go home to 2016... and I want to take my dad with us.”
Stefanie’s eyes brew wide. “Take your dad? Oh, honey… that’d be great, but how do you think he’d do in 2016? Do you think it would be too much for him?”
“What’s the alternative?” Rick asked her. “Leave him here in 2000, alone? To go back to living on the street?”
She paused for a moment, thinking. “You’re right, of course. It’s the only thing to do. But you’re stuck here in the hospital for now. You’re going to have to get your strength back before we can even consider trying to pull this off.”
Rick breathed a heavy sigh. “I guess you’re right,” he said, “but I feel like a rat in a cage. I want to get out of this room, get my dad, get back to our own time, get back to my regular doctor…”
“You’re seeing your regular doctor,” Stefanie smiled. “He’s just sixteen years younger.”
Rick attempted to give her an angry look, but couldn’t maintain it. He broke into a grin, and soon the both of them were laughing uproariously.
There was a light knock at the door, and the food services person, a young woman named Nancy, came in with Rick’s dinner. “You two sound like you’re having a good time,” she smiled.
“You have no idea,” said Stef.
~~~~~
Stefanie went to the hospital cafeteria for her own dinner, and took it back to Rick’s room. The two sat eating in silence, listening to the evening news, which was, of course, to them, fifteen years old.
The major stories on the evening news concerned the homicide charges that had been filed by Peru's attorney general against ex-President Alberto Fujimori; the assassination in Afghanistan of Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance; and the announcement by the U.S. Justice Department that it would no longer seeking to break-up Microsoft and will instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty in the United States v. Microsoft court case.
In a quiet moment, Stefanie looked over at Rick and said, “There’s something I never told you about something that happened when I was at Berkeley.”
Rick grinned over at her and said, “You and your roommate experimented together?”
She rolled her eyes. “You are so incorrigible. No, it was something I had always been
ashamed of, so I never brought it up.”
Rick looked at her with a serious expression. “Tell me.”
“My senior year… I did hit someone, driving my roommate’s car.”
“What?”
“I tried to put it out of my mind, but… yes. I was leaving in a hurry to go home, and I hit a woman who was crossing the street. I never did know her name, or what happened to her, but I got fined $220 and had to sit in jail for 30 days over it.”
Rick gave a half-smile. “Now you know who she was.”
“I guess so,” Stefanie smiled. “Anyway, after they sprung me from da joint —” they both laughed at this — “I went home to Oregon for a month, came back and picked up the shattered pieces of my spring classes, and then went to summer school in order to get enough credits to graduate.”
“Damn, that’s rough. You ran over yourself. You don’t hear about that happening every day.” Rick inclined his head, smiling at the woman he adored. “But you know what? That’s actually good to know.”
“It is?” Stefanie looked confused. “Why?”
“It means that you didn’t change history. Things happened just like they originally did.”
Stefanie’s eyes grew wide. “You’re right!”
They smiled at each other and fell silent, content simply to be in one another’s presence.
Rick picked at his food. He attributed his lack of appetite to the medications he was on and his desire to, as he put it, “blow this popsicle stand.” Stefanie, on the other hand, ate heartily and, in fact, finished most of Rick’s tray as well as her own.
CHAPTER 94
Twenty-three hours and counting since Rick had gone back in looking for Stefanie. Most of the ChroNova staff had gone home for the day, encouraged by Randall to get their rest so they would be fit for the next day, but Terry and Sarah had volunteered to keep watch.
They sat in the lab long into the night, the overhead lighting turned down to one-half intensity, eating Chinese food out of Styrofoam clamshells.
“This is sort of like a candlelight dinner for technogeeks,” Sarah said.
Terry smiled and took a bite of his General Tso’s chicken.
They continued in easy conversation, talking about, as the late Douglas Adams put it, life, the universe, and everything, drinking coffee all through the night. They kept watch over the HOT6 like shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night, as the clock ticked and May 15th turned over to May 16th.
CHAPTER 95
Stefanie stayed until the staff shooed her out, telling her that visiting hours were long since over. She caught a cab to her apartment, a luxury that she would normally never have been able to afford on her shelter salary, but Rick had given her the remaining contents of his wallet — a little more than $400 — and told her to be careful getting home.
She wouldn’t see him until the next afternoon, she’d reminded him, since she was scheduled to work the breakfast shift at the shelter kitchen. He had nodded his agreement and kissed her deeply.
“I love you, Steffi,” he told her.
“I love you, too, Ricky. Be good, sleep well, and I’ll see you around noon or so.”
“Okay,” he pouted. He hadn’t wanted her to leave.
Now he was staring at the ceiling, thinking of his colleagues at ChroNova. He wondered what Terry was doing right now. Then he realized that right now — in 1998, that is — Terry was sixteen years old, and — the little brainiac — had just graduated high school.
He flipped through the channels until he found a documentary on the band Def Leppard, and listened to that, eyes partly closed, until he drifted off to sleep.
~~~~~
“Wake up, Ricky.”
The voice was familiar, but it wasn’t Stefanie. Who…?
“Wake up, Ricky. Time to get up for school.”
Rick opened his eyes and looked around. He was in his old room, in his bed, in his mother’s house in Sacramento. What the…?
He looked down at his hands. They were the hands of a twelve-year-old. His legs were clad in dark blue Star Wars pajamas, and he was wearing a tee shirt with the Spider-Man logo on it.
He was twelve again, but with all of his 45 years of memories, and his mother was standing in the doorway of his room. A cigarette hung out of the corner of her mouth as she smiled at him. She walked in and set a clean pair of jeans and a fresh shirt on his bed.
“Come on, Ricky. Up and at ‘em. Can’t be late for school.”
“Okay,” he replied. “I, uh… Mom?”
“Yes, my darling?”
Before he knew he was going to say it, it had popped out of his mouth. “I saw Dad.”
Her mouth dropped open, and the cigarette almost fell on the floor.
“What?” she exclaimed. “What do you mean?”
“I saw him. I, uh…”
“Where did you see him?” she asked skeptically.
“He’s a homeless guy in San Francisco,” Rick said.
There was a pause for a moment as his mother processed this announcement. “Now, how in the world would you know that, Richard? We haven’t gone to San Francisco in more than two years.” She was the only one who had ever called him Richard, and that only when he was either in trouble or she was otherwise correcting him. “Your father took us there, to the Fisherman’s Wharf, and we had lunch.”
“I know, but I did see him… it’s hard to explain, Mom,” Rick said. You don’t understand, Mom; I’m really 45 and it’s 2016 and I traveled back in time through a green whirlpool to 1998 but now I’m here and it must be 1983 or so and…
He blinked, and found himself standing in a queue of black-robed students, a mortarboard cap on his head. He was eighteen, and this was his high school graduation. He waited for his turn, watching his classmates filing onto the stage one by one ahead of him; some of them raised their fists in triumph, while others simply waved at their loved ones seated out on the large auditorium. When his time came, he walked out onto the stage and shook the superintendent’s hand, received his diploma, and walked down the ramp on the other side of the stage to meet his waiting mother. She hugged him and said, “Let’s go outside, Ricky. I need to smoke.”
When they got out to the parking lot, his mother took a deep drag of her cigarette and said, “Your father would be so proud of you, Ricky.”
Rick stared at her for a moment, as if there was something he was supposed to remember to tell her, but he couldn’t recall it. Then it came tumbling out of his mouth. “I saw him.”
His mother looked at him over the frames of her glasses. “You saw who?”
“Dad. I saw him, Mom. He’s living on the streets, in San Francisco. He has been, for all these years.”
“Oh, Richard. Why would you say a thing like that?”
“Because it’s true, Mom. He —”
There was a fit of coughing behind him. He turned around and saw his mother lying on the living room couch, covered in layers of blankets. Her complexion was sallow and she was wheezing and coughing, gasping for breath.
He knew that if he went and found the newspaper that was probably still lying on the front porch, the date would read sometime in August of 1996.
His mother looked at him. The whites of her eyes were a sickly yellow color. The skin of her face was so transparent that he could see the network of bluish veins beneath it.
“Why would you tell me such a thing?” his mother said, in a voice like the grave. “Why would you tell me that you saw your father?”
“Because I —”
Rick blinked and found himself in the hospital bed. The clock on the wall, faintly illuminated by light spilling in through the open door of the hospital room, told him it was almost four in the morning.
It had all been a dream. Standing where his mother had been in the dream was his night nurse, Sophia, who had his 4 AM medications.
“Are you having any pain?” she asked.
“No,” Rick replied. “No, not anymore.”
As
Sophia administered his meds and took his vitals, he asked her, “There’s an important long distance call I need to make. Can I put it on my hospital bill?”
“I’ll check on that for you and make arrangements to have the call put through,” she said.
Thirty minutes later Rick was listening to the phone ring on the other end of the line, having placed a call to his 30-year old self’s number. It was 5:30 in the morning on the east coast. He knew that his younger counterpart would be up, getting ready to go to work. Would he answer? Was he perhaps in the shower? He wasn’t sure what exactly he would say if he heard his own, sleepy younger voice say hello.
There was a click and Rick’s heart rose into his throat; then he heard a scratchy, lo-fi recording of his own voice say “Hey, this is Rick. Can’t come to the phone right now. Leave a message. Thanks.”
He exhaled as he waited for the beep, then said, “Hey, man. We haven’t met, but I just wanted to tell you that there’s rumors that Dr. Randall Orwell is gonna put together a project in a few years that’ll knock the scientific world on its ass. If and when you get a chance to be in on it, don’t miss out.”
Rick hung up the phone, then took a deep breath and sighed.
He’d chickened out as far as trying to steer Young Rick toward Young Stef, but after all the issues they had already run into, he was a little leery about risking it again.
He laid his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes, hoping to catch another hour or two of sleep before breakfast arrived.
~~~~~
Stefanie rose early, as always when she worked breakfast; she showered, ate some toast to tide her over until she could eat at the shelter with the others, and boarded a streetcar for the short journey to work.
When she arrived few minutes before 6 AM, she was disturbed to see the county coroner’s van parked in front of the shelter, and two of the techs sliding a gurney out of the back.
