Extra Life (10 page)

“So you don’t believe me?”

“As a prank, it’s a pretty lame one, even if the story weirdly holds together,” he said. “Obviously this is just the kind of thing I’d want to believe, so there’s that.”

“I swear to—” I started, but Connie was already past the part where I promised to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It was just in his nature to trust me—because why would your best friend screw with your brain like this, right? The way he drifted off in his mind, eyes fixed on spinning plastic Saturn—I could see him thinking time warps and helicopter blades. I saw how his desperate need to believe was drowning out his careful calculations.

“Nothing came through with you? Not even your phone?” he asked.

“Came through what?”

“The theoretical wormhole.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see a hole. I might’ve just dropped my phone.” All that business with the whistling maintenance man and the fence made me forget to look for the phone on the ground. Even if it was there, it was sure as hell broken from the fall.

Connie scrambled for his own phone, tucked into a side pocket on his backpack. He was so frantic it slipped through his hands like soap. Down on his knees, he huddled over the phone and pressed the speed dial number assigned to me.

Calling Russ
on the display.

“What’s that going to do?” I asked.

Connie shushed me, then tapped a button. The audio switched to speaker, amping the ringtone loud enough to make us both grit our teeth. We both stared at the Nokia like it was a ticking bomb neither of us knew how to defuse.

It didn’t go straight to voicemail.

“Hello?” The voice was groggy, disgruntled—
you just woke me up
.

At the sound of it, Connie recoiled, hands over his mouth.

“Hello? Connie? What do you want?” the voice on the phone said.

It was my dad’s voice, slightly distorted by bad speakers, but Dad for sure.

I mouthed to Connie so Dad couldn’t hear me: “
just
my dad—so what?”

But Connie gave a slow motion headshake. Uh-uh. Not your dad.

“
It’s you
,” Connie whispered.

“W
HAT DO
you mean
it’s me
?” the phone voice asked. “Why are you calling so early?”

Connie stuttered, but I didn’t butt in. It wasn’t like I could take control of the conversation for him. I rolled my hands, signaling him to improvise. He shook his head. I clenched my jaw and glared insistently.

“Um—uh—hey, uh, Russ,” Connie finally said to the phone. “I’m just, you know, making sure you set your alarm. We don’t want to be late for school.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks for the wakeup call.” My patented sarcasm sounded way more bitter when I listened to it from outside my head.

“Oh—uh—okay,” Connie said, but the call was already dropped.

We sat on the floor in silence. A fuzzy whiteness was spreading across my mind, like what happens just before you pass out. I kept touching my face to be sure it was still there. All I could think about was the out-of-body dislocation you feel when you stand between two almost-facing mirrors so your reflections curve forever around the double bends.

But
this
was a whole other level of mind-warp. Knowing I existed in two places at once, just a little more than a mile apart. I was in Connie’s room, but also half-awake in my own bed, where I was freshly inventing new thoughts that I had already forgot eleven hours ago.

Except I wasn’t really that other person at all. I had no access to his mind. His thoughts were already branching off in new directions because I bumped him off the track that I took. I was hit with the panic of being locked inside my own shell. My involuntary reflexes, like breathing, were fighting against me. I had no way to
feel
this situation right, except that it was the most natural thing in the world—me here, and another person there. Two bodies, wholly divided. But how could I be
me
if I wasn’t who I was anymore?

“This is phenomenal,” Connie finally said.

“But
why
did you tell him to
come over here?”

“Because—because that’s what we do—we walk to school,” he argued. But he wasn’t even convincing himself. I could virtually see the multiple bad outcomes springing in his head.

Connie leapt to his computer and spread his fingers across the keys. The guy had a certified superpower for speed typing. In a flash, a website came up full of charts and graphs, with a twinkling star background. He scrolled through it all way too fast for a mental mortal like me.

“Crappity crap,” he said. “There’s also the grandfather paradox to consider.”

“Like ‘I’m My Own Grandpa?’” I asked.

“No—well, maybe. I should’ve considered this before I called the other you, but there’s a theory that, if you were to actually travel back in time, then you definitely shouldn’t have
any
interaction with yourself.”

“What could it do, cause a nuclear explosion?”

“Probably not. Hopefully not. But if you alter events from
your
past, the future
you
come from won’t exist anymore. The memories in your head won’t be possible. Any little thing can cause a butterfly effect.”

“Marty McFly disappears from his own family photo.”

“Yes, like
Spaceman from Pluto
, except the divergence you’d cause would be way too complex to fix, and every fix would create more compounded divergences…”

“So I’m screwed already, is what you’re telling me.”

“You need to lay low,
big time
,” he explained. “And I have to act just like I did yesterday. I have to pretend like you didn’t show up naked at my house this morning. I mean
your
yesterday.”

“Connie, what’s going to happen to me?”

He bit his lower lip, dropped his eyes. “I don’t know. But listen, tell me everything that happened between us in your yesterday, everything you and I said, and I’ll make sure things all turn out exactly the same. And if the Other Russ doesn’t know, he won’t do anything different, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, unconvinced. And I would’ve rather swallowed tacks than tell Connie the
Chronicle of Russ’s Worst Day Ever
. Especially the part where my total assholery gave him a panic attack and put him in an ambulance. I couldn’t imagine deliberately shoving him into that blender again. It had to be some kind of international human rights violation.

“You’re right,” Connie said, even though I hadn’t actually said anything. “I’m already compromised. How can I be natural if my whole frame of reference for reality has been changed?
Time travel
! Right here, in my world, my life. I’m never going to be the old me again. I mean, unless this is your craziest April Fool’s ever.”

“I wish.” We were a couple weeks too late for that. I tried to think through what other random chaos butterfly wings I might’ve set in motion. The people who saw me running in the buff down the street? They’d head off to work and talk about the downtown streaker instead of stock prices or whatever, and somebody would drop the ball and get fired and—and what about that maintenance worker? After catching me inside the fence, would he now remember to lock the gate—and, if so, how was the Other Me going to get in, and would Other Me also receive the
take the leap
text at 6:59?

This was worse than mentally folding those blueprint boxes on aptitude tests.

So I said, “Just, um, do what I tell you. I mean do what
he
tells you. The other one. Russ 2.0. He’ll guide you. Don’t over-think it.”

“Russ 2.0? He’s not a software application, Russ.”

“You don’t know that.”

Connie wrenched at his hair so much it styled into an Einstein. Maintaining a sense of control was bad enough for him on a regular day. This could drive him nuts—or maybe, if his obsessive catastrophe-prevention was a coping mechanism, this would be exactly the massive responsibility Connie needed to reach his potential.

He said, “But you have to stay here in my room. Mom won’t be home until tonight, so you won’t run into anyone. You also can’t call anyone. Or post anything on the Internet.”

“I won’t even eat any of your food,” I vowed, meaning it, honestly. My mind was way too blown to think about eating or stepping outside. For the rest of the day, I just wanted to lay back and try my best to understand what was happening.

“All right. This could work.”

“But there’s a big hole in your plan,” I said.

He scrunched his brow for about a nanosecond before it hit him. “Right. Damn it. You can’t stay in my room forever.”

“Exactly.”

Connie put a firm hand on my shoulder, something else he never did before. He said, “It’ll work itself out, I think. Yes.” Subtext being:
this is a load of crap I’m feeding you, but you’ll totally lose your mind if I don’t offer some lame consolation to get you through the day
.

We could’ve listed concerns for another few hours, but the clock ticked on. A glance through the blinds verified that Russ 2.0 was sauntering down the sidewalk toward Connie’s house. Connie had to be down there, ready to go, as always.

“Don’t get in any trouble,” he said.

“You either.”

I took my post at the window again and there he was, down at the foot of Connie’s steps, my clone, the first recruit in my storm trooper army. There was no sudden mind-blowing infinite regress, no split consciousness or slow fade of my body to transparency and then nothingness. I watched my hand for five seconds to be sure it stayed solid, and it did.

All the science fiction was wrong, or at least, failed to capture the weird duality. Like imagining my funeral, or what my life would be if I were born to other parents, or if I lived in California in the 1950s, or even something as minor as standing two feet to the left of myself, an out-of-body drift. You are an active mind at an instant in space and time, projecting yourself into another space and time where you are
not
. It is and it isn’t. Everything totally comprehensible, perfectly normal, but at the same time impossible. A reality just out of reach. Every dream convinces us of something ridiculous until we wake up.

Watching myself from this angle, I remembered almost exactly what my thoughts had been when I stood down there yesterday—the
other
yesterday. I’d been thinking how Connie’s father’s death in Afghanistan left this huge house way too empty. But now, in my new, separate self, I stifled a weird urge to leap out the window and pounce onto 2.0 so hard that we’d merge into one body again. It was a wacko idea, but logic had become a lost cause.

Connie actually went out to meet him. I couldn’t hear them talk, but all the gestures and movements seemed right—a rerun of the day before. Good continuity. Just like last time, Russ 2.0 offered over the “Take the Leap” script, and Connie accepted it, reluctantly. It almost tore me in half watching them this second time, knowing what torture I’d soon put Connie through, all over again.

But that was how the story played out. Had to be. It was the only way to avoid triggering some paradox that would erase my existence. Or worse, open a black hole in the mid-Atlantic seaboard, sucking the whole galaxy into dark-energy nothingness.

Hypothetically.

As they turned to leave, Connie looked back at his window, at me.

I flinched away from view, thinking he’d just screwed up and created the first major discrepancy. But then I remembered that Connie actually
had
looked back at the house that first time. And when I called him out for it, he claimed it was déjà
vu.

My mind was really reeling now. Maybe all of this had already been accounted for. Maybe when I was in Russ 2.0’s place, another version of me was here in this bedroom, hoping Connie wouldn’t alter a thing. Could be the real reason Connie was so nervous all day.

A strange loop, playing over and over again, always exactly the same.