Ray & Me (11 page)

I
COULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT WAS HAPPENING
. A
GUY WITH
arms that were thicker than my legs had wrapped a straitjacket around me and tied it tight. Then he picked me up, hoisted me over his shoulder, and carried me down the hallway.

“Dr. Wright!” I shouted.

“Shut yer trap!” barked the goon who was carrying me. “Before it fills with flies.”

He carried me down the winding hall until he passed a sign that said
INSANE WARD
. Then he pulled open an unmarked door and dumped me on the floor.

“See you in the next century!” he said with a snort. He slammed the heavy door behind him as he left.

Not
again
!

I looked around. This time it wasn't a room. It was more like a cell. Dank. Dark. No furniture. No nothing.

A minute later the door opened, startling me. The goon was back. This time he was carrying Dr. Wright over his shoulder. He threw him down roughly.

“I brought you some company,” he said to me, “in case you get lonely. Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

He left, slamming the door. A key clicked in the lock.

Dr. Wright stood up and leaned his shoulder against the wall.

“Padded cell,” he said. “Nice.”

“Why did they put us in here?” I asked.

“So we can't smash our heads against the wall and try to kill ourselves,” he replied.

“People really do that?”

“Sure,” Dr. Wright told me, “if they're frustrated enough.”

“But this is a
hospital
,” I said. “They're supposed to make people
better
.”

“Mental illness wasn't understood very well a century ago,” said Dr. Wright. “They didn't know what to do with insane people. So they locked them up, like criminals.”

“We're not insane!” I said.

“They
think
we are,” Dr. Wright said. “And who can blame them? We said we came from the future. A crazy black man wearing makeup was telling them how to perform brain surgery. No wonder they thought we were nuts.”

I had to laugh. And I realized that our situation wasn't actually as desperate as it appeared. All we
had to do was get the pack of new baseball cards out of my back pocket. We could use one to blow out of there and go back to our own time.

The only problem was that my hands were wrapped tightly. I couldn't move them. We positioned ourselves back-to-back so Dr. Wright could try to get at my back pocket. But his straitjacket was longer than mine, and he could barely get his fingertips out. He turned around and tried to untie my straitjacket with his teeth.

“Hurry up!” I said as he struggled. “Somebody could come in at any second!”

“I…can't…do it,” Dr. Wright said, grunting from the effort. He was sweating. Finally, he tumbled to the floor, exhausted. He lay there for a minute, panting.

It finally sunk in. We could be stuck here. Somebody would eventually find my baseball cards and take them away. There would be no way to get back to our time. We would have to live our lives starting in 1920…in an insane asylum.

I did the math in my head. If I was 13 years old in 1920, I'd be 93 in 2000. Hardly anybody lives that long. What was the life expectancy in 1920, anyway? Probably 60 or so.

I wouldn't live to see the millennium. I wouldn't live long enough to see my own birth.

I wish I had listened to my mom all the times she'd warned me about the dangers of time traveling. Now I would never see her again.

My chest tightened. Tears were welling up in my eyes.

“It's my fault,” I choked.

“No,” Dr. Wright said. “I'm the adult. I should have anticipated all the possibilities.”

It didn't matter whose fault it was. We were stuck in 1920, and we were going to die sometime in the twentieth century. Nobody from our time would ever know what happened to us.

Maybe I could write a note
, I thought. I would write a note to my parents and tell them how much I loved them. I'd find a way to make sure the note got to them in the future. I could take it to Louisville and hide it in the house where I would grow up and—

No, that was crazy. They might get the note before I was born. It wouldn't mean anything to them. Or the previous owner of the house might find my note and throw it away.

Wait a minute. My house wasn't
built
in 1920. There was no place to hide a note for my parents to find.

I sat down and leaned against the wall next to Dr. Wright. My eyes were watery, and my shoulders were heaving. I didn't even try to pretend that I wasn't crying. I just let it out. I couldn't even wipe the tears off my face.

Dr. Wright leaned against me and told me everything would work out. We'd find a way out of here, he insisted. He was just trying to make me feel better.

We were both quiet for a few minutes. I was trying to resign myself to my fate.

“If we get out of this,” Dr. Wright finally said, “what will you do when you get home?”

“Hug my mom,” I said right away.

“No, I mean, with your life?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I replied. “Something I never did before. Maybe learn how to play guitar. Drums, maybe.”

“What about baseball?” he asked.

“I've been playing ball for a long time,” I said. “The kids are getting bigger and stronger, throwing and hitting the ball harder. A lot of guys are giving up baseball.”

“Coach Valentini told me you're one of the best players on the team,” Dr. Wright said.

“Not good enough to get out of the way if a ball is coming at me,” I replied.

“Look, Joseph, bad things happen in life sometimes,” Dr. Wright said. “That was a fluke. You can't just avoid things every time something bad happens to you. When I was in med school, we had this patient who got hurt in a traffic accident, so she decided not to drive anymore. Fair enough. Then she had a bad experience at a supermarket, and she decided not to go grocery shopping anymore. Eventually, she just sat inside all the time. She figured she would never have a bad experience that way. And she didn't. She never had
any
experiences.”

“I have nightmares about getting hit again,” I
confided. “That ball came at me so fast. I never even saw it.”

Dr. Wright struggled to his feet and went over to examine the padded wall.

“You know, I almost quit medicine right after I finished school,” he said, as he looked to see if there was a crack or another door somewhere along the wall.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was performing an endoscopic pituitary procedure on a man,” Dr. Wright told me. “He was one of my first patients. I did the operation correctly, just the way I was taught. But the guy died, anyway. Sometimes, no matter what we do, the patient still dies. I was aware of that possibility. But I was devastated.”

“Why didn't you quit?” I asked.

“I thought about it,” Dr. Wright said. “I could have gone to law school, or studied business or something else. But I knew that wouldn't make me happy. I love medicine. I love the idea of taking a sick person and making them better. If you do what you love, you'll love what you do.”

I thought about what he said for a few minutes, then asked him the same question he asked me.

“If we get out of this, what will
you
do when you get home?”

“Me? I'm hoping to travel to the future.”

“Huh?”

“Joseph, do you remember that envelope I brought with me?” Dr. Wright asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “What was in there?”

“Before we left home,” he said excitedly, “I wrote out the proper way to do an epidural hematoma. I explained why the surgery needs to be done as soon as they find a skull fracture in a patient. I also wrote all I knew about penicillin; the polio vaccine; the dangers of cholesterol, trans fats, cigarette smoking, and AIDS. I told them about seat belts, air bags, and CAT scans. I told them about all the advances in the health care field that have taken place in the last 90 years.”

“Them?” I asked. “Who's them?”

“The doctors of 1920,” Dr. Wright said. “You see, Joseph, I've always wondered what would have happened if the lightbulb, for instance, or the airplane had been invented a hundred years earlier. Technology would have moved along a century faster. It would almost be like traveling to the future.”

“I don't quite get it,” I admitted.

“Joseph, if I can travel back in time and give the doctors of the past something they don't yet have, or teach them something they don't yet know, I can essentially push time and medicine forward.”

“So when you return to your own time, everything would be more advanced than it was when you left?” I asked. “Because the people living in the past had a century to use what you told them?”

“Exactly!” said Dr. Wright. “I didn't come with you to 1920 just to save Ray Chapman, Joseph. I came here to save
thousands
of people. Maybe millions. I
gave the envelope to that doctor. If he reads what I wrote and publishes that information, it will be a different world when we get home. Medical science will have advanced nearly a century.”

“What do you think will change?” I asked.

“Each of us is born with a certain number of nerve cells. We don't grow new ones, and we gradually lose the ones we have. The holy grail for doctors like me is to regenerate nerve cells, to figure out how to create new ones. We could cure so many diseases, and help so many people. If I could be around to see that—well, it would be my way of traveling to the future.”

I always thought it would be cool to travel to the future too. They'll probably have flying cars and microwave freezers, stuff like that. But I would need a future baseball card, of course. And they're not printed yet. So traveling to the future is pretty much impossible.

It was interesting to think about, but none of that stuff mattered. We were stuck in 1920. Dr. Wright couldn't find any cracks in the wall. The door was sealed shut. We weren't going to the future. We weren't going to the past. We weren't going
anywhere
.

“Man, you'd have to be a Houdini to get out of this place,” Dr. Wright mumbled.

I stopped.

“What did you just say?” I asked.

“I said you'd have to be a Houdini to get out of here.”

Yeah, Houdini.
He
would be able to get out. He could escape from
anything
.

That's when I figured it out.

“I know how we can do it!” I told Dr. Wright.

“How?”

“When I got hit by that ball,” I said, “I fell down and dislocated my shoulder.”

“So?”

“So when I came to 1920 the first time, I saw Houdini escape from a straitjacket while he was hanging upside down outside a building,” I said excitedly. “Later, in that bar we went to, he told me how he did it. His trick for escaping from a straitjacket was to dislocate his shoulder!”

“What?!” Dr. Wright said. “That's crazy.”

“Houdini told me that when your shoulder is dislocated once, it is easier to dislocate it again.”

“Well, that's true,” said Dr. Wright. “The ligaments become slightly lax. You're not actually planning to dislocate your shoulder, are you?”

I wasn't waiting around for anybody's permission. I moved my shoulder up and down, forward and back. There wasn't much give inside the straitjacket, but there was a little. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and rolled my shoulder around in its socket.

“Careful, Joseph.”

It hurt. It hurt bad. Whenever I moved my shoulder forward, a bolt of pain shot through my upper body. Sweat was dripping off my nose.

“You don't have to do this, Joseph,” said Dr.
Wright. “We'll find another way out of here.”

“And what if we don't?” I yelled at him.

I forced my shoulder forward, fighting the pain. Sweat was pouring off my forehead. I was reaching the threshold of how much pain I could bear.

“Stop it, Joseph! I'm afraid you're going to permanently damage—”

“I'm not quitting!” I said. “You didn't quit!”

I strained just a bit further. And then I felt a pop.

“I did it!” I grunted.

The pain was so intense I could barely breathe. But with my shoulder out of its socket, there was just a little extra room in the straitjacket. The pain was unbearable, but I wriggled around until I could feel the straps start to loosen. I jumped up and down, trying to get gravity to do some of the work. I must have
really
looked like a crazy person.

Little by little I was able to get one strap loose. Dr. Wright pulled at it with his teeth. I had some breathing room now. The other straps were starting to slacken. I wriggled and twisted and spun around, trying to get them off.

Finally, the straps fell away. I ripped off the straitjacket with my good hand and flung it aside.

“I'm Houdini!” I exclaimed.

I started untying Dr. Wright's straitjacket. It wasn't easy with just one good hand, but I did it. Dr. Wright finished the job and tossed his straitjacket against the wall. Then he grabbed me by the shoulder.

“You're going to feel a little pressure, Joseph,” he
said. Before I knew what was happening, he pulled on my shoulder hard.

Craaackkkk.

“Owwwww!” I yelled, as my shoulder popped back into place.

“Okay!” Dr. Wright said. “Get one of your baseball cards! Let's get out of here!”

I found the cards in my pocket and quickly ripped open the pack. It felt warm. I grabbed a random card in one hand and held Dr. Wright's hand with the other.

We closed our eyes. I thought about going home. To Louisville. In
our
time.

In the distance, I heard what sounded like footsteps coming down the hallway.