The Time Traveler's Almanac (153 page)

“Yeah,” Justin said. “I had spares made. How about you?”

“Me, too.” His older self grinned a lopsided grin. “We think alike. Amazing, huh?”

“Amazing. Right.” Justin abruptly turned away and started walking toward Sears and the lot beyond it. “This better work.”

“It will.” Himself-at-forty sounded disgustingly confident.

The two Toyotas sat only a couple of rows apart. They were almost as much alike as Justin and his older self. Justin moved his things into the other car, while himself-at-forty put stuff in his. They traded keys. “You know where I live,” Justin said. “What’s my new address?”

“Oh.” His older self gave it to him. He knew where it was – not as good a neighborhood as the one the Acapulco was in. Himself-at-forty went on, “The car’s insured, and you’ll find plenty of money in the underwear drawer.” His older self patted him on the shoulder, the only time they’d touched other than shaking hands. “It’ll be fine. Honest. You’re on vacation for a couple of months, that’s all.”

“On vacation from my
life,
” Justin exclaimed. He glared at his older self. “Don’t fuck up, that’s all.”

“It’s my life, too, remember.” Himself-at-forty got into the car Justin had driven to the mall. Justin went to his older self”s Toyota. Still half wondering if this were some elaborate scam, he tried the key. The car started right up. Justin drove off to see where the hell he’d have to wait this out.

*   *   *

Sure enough, the Yachtsman and the apartment buildings on the block with it were older and tireder-looking than the Acapulco and its surroundings. It wasn’t a neighborhood where guys sold crack from parked cars, but it might be heading that way in a few years. The one bright spot Justin saw was the Denny’s on the corner. If he got sick of frozen dinners and his own bad cooking, he could always eat there.

He found his parking space under the apartment building. When he went out to the lobby, a mailbox had KLOSTER Dymo-taped onto it. He checked. His older self hadn’t got any mail. Justin went inside and found his apartment. The door key and dead-bolt key both worked. “Well, what have we got?” he wondered.

When he discovered what he had, his first impulse was to walk right out again. The TV just plugged into the wall: no cable, not even a VCR hooked up. The stereo had to have come out of an antique store. It played cassettes and vinyl, but not CDs. He could play CDs on the PowerBook, but even so …

He opened the underwear drawer, more than half expecting BVDs and nothing else. But under the briefs lay … “Christ!” he exclaimed. How much was there? He picked up wad after wad of cash, threw them all down on the bed, and started counting. By the time he was through, he’d had almost as much fun as he’d ever had in his life.

Close to seventy grand,
he thought dazedly.
Jesus.
All at once, he stopped doubting his older self’s story. Nobody – but nobody – would spend, or let him spend, that kind of money on a scam. The bills weren’t even crisp and new, as they might have been if they were counterfeits. They’d all been circulating a good long while, and couldn’t be anything but genuine.

“Okay,” he said, fighting the impulse to count them again. “I’m on vacation. Let the good times roll.” He
did
recount a couple of thousand dollars’ worth, just for the hell of it.

He’d never been in a spot where he could spend all the money he wanted, do whatever he felt like doing. If he wanted to go out and get a VCR, he could – and he intended to. He could charge right down to Circuit City or Best Buy or Fry’s and …

“Uh-oh,” he muttered. If he went to any of those places, there was some chance he’d run into Megan. His older self didn’t want him running into Megan for a while, and his older self had left him all this money to play around with so he wouldn’t. He shrugged. He could go over to Burbank or out to Simi Valley or wherever and get a VCR. Then he could charge right down to Blockbuster and rent enough tapes to keep him from getting too …

Uh-oh.
He didn’t say it this time, but he thought it. Megan was liable to show up at either of the local Blockbusters; she liked watching movies on video as much as everybody else did.

“Okay,” Justin said, as if somebody were arguing with him. “I’ll find some video place out in the boonies, too.”

That made him happier. He had time to kill – nothing but time to kill – and movies were a great way to kill it. But he couldn’t watch movies and play computer games all the damn time.
I can go down to
 … But that thought stopped before it was even half formed. He couldn’t go to the mall, not to Northridge, not to Topanga Plaza, not even to the half-dead Promenade farther down Topanga or to tacky Fallbrook. Megan visited all of them.

“Shit,” he said in a low voice. And he really couldn’t go to any of his favorite restaurants, because where would himself-at-forty be taking Megan? To one of them or another, sure as hell. What would she think if she were with his older self and then saw him come in by himself in different clothes? Nothing good, that was for damn sure.

Great,
Justin thought.
I can do whatever I want, as long as I don’t do it in any of the places I usually go to. Or I can just sit here in this miserable apartment and jack off.
He suspected he’d end up doing a lot of that. Thinking about Megan immediately made him want to do more than think about Megan: he was, after all, twenty-one.

Down, boy,
he told himself. Himself didn’t want to listen. While he was holed up here by his lonesome, himself-at-forty would be taking Megan out, taking Megan home, taking Megan to bed. No, he didn’t like that worth a rat’s ass. He tried again to imagine Megan being unfaithful to him with somebody with his own face. He came a lot closer to succeeding this time.

He paced out to the kitchen. Even looking at the bed turned him on and pissed him off, regardless of whether it had cash strewn all over it. When he opened the refrigerator, he found a couple of six-packs of microbrews along with fresh vegetables and other things he was unlikely to eat. He tried to unscrew the cap from one of the beers, only to discover it didn’t unscrew. That meant he had to rummage in the drawer till he came up with an opener. Once he got the cap off, he threw it at the wastebasket – and missed. He had to bend down and drop it in – and even then he almost missed again.

Sighing, Justin sipped the hard-won Anchor Porter … and made a horrible face. “People pay a buck a bottle for
this?
” he said. “Jesus! Gimme Coors Light any day.”

When he opened the freezer, he found steaks and chops and chicken in there. He supposed he could do up the steaks in a pan on the stove, but chicken was out of his culinary league. Fortunately, there were also several frozen dinners. He didn’t know what he would have done if his older self had turned into a total foodie.

Like hell I don’t know,
he thought, and grinned.
I’d just eat out all the time. With that Denny’s right at the end of the block, I might anyway.

After watching network TV that night, he realized he would have to get a VCR ASAP if he wanted to stay anywhere close to sane. He ate bacon and eggs and hash browns at the Denny’s the next morning, then drove over to an electronics place he knew on Ventura Boulevard in Encino – only twenty minutes’ drive from the Yachtsman, but not a place where he was at all likely to run into Megan. He bought the VCR, put the box in his trunk, and headed to a Blockbuster a few doors away to get some tapes.

His address came up on their computer system. “You do know we have locations closer to your home, sir?” the clerk said.

“Yeah.” Justin nodded. “This is near where I work.”

He’d never been a great liar. He was, at the moment, wearing a Dilbert T-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts. The clerk raised an eyebrow. But Justin’s credit checked out okay, so that was all she did.

Having lugged the VCR into his apartment, he discovered, not for the first time, that being a computer-science major didn’t make the damn thing easy to set up. He fumed and mumbled and cussed and finally got the gadget acting the way it was supposed to. With
Deep Impact
on the TV and a Coke in his hand, life looked better.

He put his feet on the coffee table and belched enormously. Nothing to do but kick back and watch movies for a couple of months?
Okay, I can handle it,
he thought. Then he snapped his fingers. “Potato chips!” he said out loud. “Doritos. Whatever.”

*   *   *

That day went fine. The next day went all right. By the middle of the afternoon on the third day, he was sick of movies and computer games and hoped he’d never see another nacho-cheese Dorito as long as he lived. He went into the bedroom and picked up the phone. He’d dialed four digits of Megan’s number before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to call her.

“God damn it,” he muttered. “This is so lame. What am I going to do, stay cooped up here till I get all dusty?”

His older self wanted him to do exactly that. His older self had left him plenty of money so he would do exactly that. But what good was the money if he had trouble finding places to blow it? After staring at the walls – and the TV screen, and his laptop’s monitor – for two days straight, his affection for his older self, which had never been high, sank like the Dow on an especially scary day. He’d never understood people saying money couldn’t buy happiness. Now maybe he did.

He wanted to talk with his girlfriend. Hell, he wanted to lay his girlfriend. Himself-at-forty was telling him he couldn’t do either. Himself-at-forty, the son of a bitch, was probably doing both. Justin was no better at handling frustration than anyone else his age. The hornier he got, the worse he got, too.

If he couldn’t talk to Megan, he damn well could talk to his older self. He dialed the number at his apartment, which felt funny. He never called there. Why would he? If he wasn’t home, who would answer? A burglar?

But somebody was home to answer now. And, after three rings, somebody did. “Hello?” Himself-at-forty sounded as if he were talking from deep underwater.

“Hi,” Justin said cheerfully; he had all he could do not to say
hiya,
the way Megan did. “How are things?”

“Things are fine,” his older self answered after a longish pause. He still sounded like hell; if he hadn’t been ridden hard and put away wet, Justin had never heard anybody who had. Another pause. Then himself-at-forty tried again: “Or they were till you called. I was asleep.”

“
Now
?” Justin exclaimed in disbelief. He looked at his watch: half past two. He didn’t think he’d been asleep at half past two since he was three years old and quit taking naps. “I called now ’cause I figured you wouldn’t be.”

“Never mind.” His older self yawned, but seemed a little less fuzzy when he went on, “Yeah, things are okay. We went to the Probe last night, and—”

“
Did
you?” Justin broke in. He didn’t like the way that sounded: him stuck here in this miserable place, himself-at-forty having a good time at his favorite club. No, he didn’t like that at all. “What else did you do?”

“That after-hours place,” his older self answered. “Some guy came through with fliers, so I knew how to get there.”

Yeah, you’d have forgotten, wouldn’t you, you sorry bastard?
Aloud, Justin said, “Lucky you. And what
else
did you do?” He could imagine Megan in his older self’s arms, all right. Now he could. He’d had plenty of time to try. Practice made perfect, dammit. He could hate what he imagined, too.

“About what you’d expect,” himself-at-forty said. Christ, he sounded arrogant. “I’m you, remember. What would you have done?” Justin sighed. He knew what he would have done, by God. But no. He’d stayed here by his lonesome – by his very lonesome – so his older self could do it instead. He sucked in a long, angry breath preparatory to telling himself-at-forty where to head in. Before he could, his older self went on, “And when I took her home, I told her I loved her.”

“Jesus!” Justin yelped, forgetting whatever else he might have said. “What did you go and do that for?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” his older self asked.

“That doesn’t mean you’ve got to
say
it, for Christ’s sake,” Justin answered. He shook his head in disbelief, though his older self wasn’t there to see it. His parents must have said they loved each other once upon a time, too, and how had that turned out? “What am I supposed to do when you go away?”

“Marry her, doofus,” himself-at-forty said, as if it were just that simple. “Live happily ever after, so I get to live happily ever after, too. Why the hell do you think I came back here?”

“For your good time, man, not mine,” Justin snarled. “I’m sure not having a good time, I’ll tell you.” He belched again. No surprise – how many Cokes had he poured down since he got to this place? Too many. With the carbonation, he tasted stale nacho cheese.

His older self took a deep breath, too, and said, “Look, chill for a while, okay? I’m doing fine.”

That only made Justin angrier. “Sure you are. You’re doing fucking great. What about me?”

“You’re fine. Chill. You’re on vacation,” himself-at-forty answered. If he didn’t know everything, he didn’t know he didn’t know everything. “Go ahead. Relax. Spend my money. That’s what it’s there for.”

When his older self mentioned the money, Justin forgot how chuffed he was, at least for a little while. “Where’d you get so much?” he asked. “What did you do, rob a bank?”

“It’s worth a lot more now than it will be then,” his older self told him. “Inflation. Have some fun. Just be discreet, okay?”

Which brought Justin back to square one. His older self kept trying to blow him off, and he didn’t want to put up with it. “You mean, get out of your hair.”

“In a word, yes.” Himself-at-forty sounded as if he was having trouble putting up with Justin, too.

“While you’re in Megan’s hair.” No, Justin had no trouble at all seeing pictures in his mind, pictures nastier than any he could have pulled off the Net. He sighed, trying to make them go away. “I don’t know, dude.”