Double Take
Chapter 2
“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
FUCK!
I came out of my coma with a gasp that nearly ripped my throat out. Beeps and alarms rang and people started skittering about like cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on. Everything hurt. I should have asked for an inventory of my injuries. I get that I stepped out in front of a bus, but why did my eyes and fingernails hurt?
It was hard to tune in what people were saying. Somebody was waving fingers in front of my face and asking how many I could see. Stupid fucker. How was I supposed to answer? I had tubes down my throat and both hands were in a cast. If there’s an afterlife one day instead of a transfer to an alternate reality, I’m going to find my other self and kill him.
Well, I was awake, more or less. They adjusted drips in my IV and a little of the pain faded. Enough that I could focus. Once the quacks satisfied themselves that I was alive, they let my mother get close enough to see for herself.
“Oh, Jakey, you’re back. Please stay with us, baby boy. Please don’t ever do this to us again. What did we do that made you hate us so much?”
Mom?
Okay, if I was fourteen then she’d be what… thirty-eight? The last time I’d seen her was before her last surgery and she was um… seventy-four. Right before my fiftieth birthday. I celebrated my half-century standing beside her fresh grave. She’d looked so worn and tired before that surgery. Too tired to come out of it, apparently. The woman leaning over me looked tired, too. I wondered if I was the reason.
There was something else, though, besides her being younger than I remembered last. I didn’t remember her ever wearing her hair curled up like a French poodle on top of her head. And she was wearing makeup. Back in 1952, as I remembered it… well, Mom was no June Cleaver. She dressed nicely enough for housework and got dressed up for church on Sunday. But makeup? What the fuck?
What she was saying didn’t really make a difference since I couldn’t respond. Considering my first thoughts, it was better that way. She rambled on and on but I wasn’t able to pay attention. I guessed they were giving me morphine or something like that because I was getting incredibly scrambled messages from my brain. I guess that’s what the voice had warned me about. I was trying to integrate my memories as an eighty-year-old with my memories as a fourteen-year-old, only they weren’t exactly my memories. They were the memories of someone else who lived in what was now my body.
I recognized some things as they flashed past. My house. I could tell it was the same house but it looked different. The yard was neatly mowed, so maybe my version two self had been responsible enough to take care of it before he tried to off himself. The color was different than I remembered, too. Mom used to describe the house as being ‘baby-shit yellow’ but this was definitely just a pale yellow like cream. Maybe V2 was colorblind. Or maybe my V1 memory was from before the house was painted. Or something.
My bicycle was a lot nicer than I remembered. I could remember imagining that I’d ride it into traffic and get run over but decided to leave it home that day so the bike wouldn’t get destroyed. How considerate of me. I didn’t remember ever having a bicycle that nice.
I wondered when my father would show up in the hospital to tell me what a disappointment I was. At least I assumed that would be the message. It was certainly what Mom was conveying. Did they talk to me like this all the time? No wonder I tried to off myself.
I let my mind wander and it wandered straight to my seventeen-year-old sister. Damn! What a fox. Just that morning, I’d seen her coming out of the shower with just a towel that didn’t quite cover her ass cheeks. I’d gone to my room and beaten off to that vision.
Damn it! I was lying in a hospital room with tubes running in and out of me and casts on my arms and God-knows where else and getting a damned erection. And it hurt, damn it! They must have had a catheter stuck in my prick. I tried to erase the image of my sister and her towel, but I wanted it where I could access it later. Like when I got the damn catheter out. V1 didn’t remember my sister being quite such a fox.
I’d been through life before. Eighty years, ten months, and nine days. I considered myself version one, or just V1. The kid who had been treating my parents like crap for fourteen years was definitely V2. I guess the hybrid, my current life, was V3. I could tell most of my work in this life was making V3 into what I wanted to be. Especially considering what a cockup V2 had been.
It was hard to even consider him to be me. I guess he wasn’t me. But we had the same parents, the same family, as far as I could tell, we had the same school and classmates. What could have been so much worse about his life than what I lived before?
I was suffocating. The walls were pressing in on me. It was dark and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. All I could hear was the thumping of my own pulse in my ears. I screamed but no sound came out.
“Hey. Hey, it’s okay, J. Wake up, brother. You’re safe now. I won’t let you go.”
My eyes snapped open and air filled my lungs like it had been forced there. I choked and coughed, just wanting to inhale more and more. I’d never had dreams of claustrophobia before. What on earth…? I realized I still couldn’t move. Both arms were in casts down to my fingers. One leg was in a rock up to my balls. My ribs hurt. That was progress. I was able to start naming where the pains were.
“Em?” I croaked. They’d taken out the feeding tube yesterday when they realized I was actually awake and could respond to drinking liquids. I still had tubes running out elsewhere.
“I got the lucky draw to spend the night tonight. Dad went home a couple of hours ago,” she said. “Need some water?” I nodded and she fitted a straw to my lips. My throat was still sore from the tube but my jaw ached as well. Someone said I’d knocked some teeth loose.
“Nightmare,” I said when I’d moistened my mouth. “Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Awful. So scared.”
“It’s your casts and the trauma. Just a dream. It will heal,” she said. “I didn’t let go of you then and I won’t now. J, you had me so scared. I know it’s been hard but don’t quit on me. Please?”
“I… I’m back, Em. I’ll live. I promise.”
My sister stroked my forehead and hair. I looked up at her in the dimly lit room and saw her breasts a few inches from my face. I grimaced as tumescence fought with my catheter.
“Do you need something more for pain?” she asked. “The nurse said she’d bring something when you needed it.”
“No. It’s okay. Just uncomfortable.”
“Someone needs to wash your hair tomorrow. What a greasy mess.”
“How long?”
“Your hair? Below your ears, like usual. They didn’t have to cut it.”
“How long was I out?”
“Oh. The um… accident was Sunday. It’s Friday night now. You woke up Wednesday afternoon. They’d just told us… told us you weren’t going to make it. Then all of a sudden you were awake and choking. I was praying for you, J. The whole time I was asking God to give you another chance.” She leaned in farther and gave me as much of an embrace as possible. I couldn’t lift my arms to return the gesture but I could feel her soft breasts pressed against my chest. Damned cock! I gasped and she pulled away.
“Maybe I should get something for pain after all.” She pressed the bedside button. “Thank you, Em. Thank you for being here and for praying for me.”
I remembered being sort of semi-religious during my teens. We went to church. I prayed. Mostly, I prayed that this girl or that would go out with me. When I was seventeen, I prayed that the girl I was out with would kiss me and promised God that if she did, I’d never kiss another girl. She didn’t. Wouldn’t. Spread the word around that I liked to get right down to business on a date. I thought that was a little unfair since we’d been dating for two months and I just tried to kiss her goodnight. Now I was probably ranked as her #metoo.
Well, we learned. Back in the fifties we were jerks. I got better, more respectful. Didn’t mean I wasn’t a jerk back then. Back now, I supposed. I had to remind myself that I was back in my fourteen-year-old body, even though it hurt worse than my V1 eighty-year-old body. I was probably still a jerk. I’d certainly been waiting in convenient places, hoping to get a glimpse of my big sister’s body.
I had a little sister, too. Peyton. Who names a kid Peyton? My parents sometimes went out on the far end of weird. For that matter, why did they bother to name me Jacob when they called me Jake or Jakey. Em started calling me by my initial, J, and Peyton was quick to follow her lead. Now we were Em, J, and Pey to each other. Mom was appalled.
I’d kind of quit praying to God when I got into college. Too many unanswered prayers, I suppose. Or God just wasn’t interested in my dating life, so I didn’t see much use in him. Now I had a different perspective entirely. The voice that put me back here in my fourteen-year-old self never mentioned anything about God. Or an afterlife. It had led me to believe that I was a special case because they happened to have a me in another reality who was also in a coma but wanted to die. I didn’t, so they swapped me. Where was God in that process?
I drifted in and out of drug-hazed sleep thinking deep thoughts. Em prayed for me. Maybe that was why they or it or whatever put me into this body. Maybe it was to answer Em’s prayer. It was nice to know she was in my corner. I didn’t have that close a relationship with her the first time around. I certainly didn’t remember her being so… Damn it! I’d forgotten what it was like to have a fourteen-year-old cock. I really needed to get this damned tube out of it.
“Do I have to move my stuff out of your room now?” Peyton asked about a week later. She had been trying to play ‘Go Fish’ with me but was frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t hold the cards. There were lots of things I couldn’t do and I figured it was going to be a long time before I could. I could bend at the waist, so the bed got cranked up during the day to semi-sitting. I thought I must look like one of those cartoon characters with casts all over my body and my head wrapped in bandages. Except there was only a bandage on the right side of my head. Cut. Concussion, yes, but they don’t bandage for that. There were no deep scalp cuts that required more than a stitch or two. The one on my right jaw, though—the one that hurt when I tried to chew—had a bandage on it. It just didn’t wrap around my whole head.
“What’s your stuff doing in my room?” I asked.
“You said.”
“What did I say?”
“You said when you were gone I could have your room. Everybody said you were going to die, so I kind of moved in. I’ve been sleeping in your bed,” she said. Totally guileless. At eight years old, she just figured I was moving out and she was getting my room.
“Did you want me to die?” I asked. It took her a minute to consider the question.
“Huh-uh.” She gathered up the cards and set them aside before standing on tiptoes beside the bed and kissing my cheek—the one that wasn’t stitched. “I wanted to sleep on your pillow and tell you to come back to it. And Em was crying really loud, so I moved to your room.”
“Well, maybe I should switch places with you and move in with Em. Then you could have my room.”
“That would be okay!”
“Uh… just a word of advice. Don’t suggest that.”
I don’t think V1 had had an unassisted erection in fifteen years. Everything still worked if I paid attention to it and concentrated. I’d been beating off two or three times a week right up until they stole my bottle of lotion. Fuckers. They called me crazy because I carried my dead Kindle around with me and rolled newspaper into fake cigars. The last thing I did before the Kindle battery died on me was unregister it so no fucker could steal my account and books. They already had the charger. I was sure they were waiting for me to leave the Kindle unattended for a minute. It would be gone, too.
Now that I was V3 and had a damn plastic tube in my cock, I was getting hard every time a nurse walked by. Or my older sister came to visit. She stopped by almost every day but once they figured I was going to live, the overnight vigils stopped. Most of the nurses wore armor-strength underwear. Their boobs didn’t move at all. I mean, they could do jumping jacks and it would be like two knots on a tree trunk. They only go where the trunk goes.
I suppose they were all used to having teenage boys gaping at them and hoping to cop a feel somehow. My feelers, of course, were wrapped in plaster. Both arms had the elbow immobilized, which meant I couldn’t even feel myself. If I could, I’d have ripped the catheter out! Not being able to do anything about it didn’t stop my cock from responding. After a long discussion, they took the catheter out two weeks after I woke up. This was going to be a long fucking process.
I had to call for help in order to piss and they threatened to put a catheter back in if I didn’t give them enough time to get set up. They stuck a plastic milk bottle over my cock and told me to just relax and pee. No, it wasn’t really a milk bottle, but that’s what it reminded me of. They kept me in a diaper like Renie used to wear because it was more difficult to get me into position to poop than to pee.
Once the catheter came out, having a nurse—even an old ugly one—handle my cock to get it into the bed urinal or clean me up after a bowel movement had predictable results. There was nothing sexy about it, but I got hard anyway. Part of the problem was having an eighty-year-old mind. Even my mother looked young and sexy to V1. And Emily was mouth-watering. A fifty-year-old nurse could make me feel young. And a fourteen-year-old body responded accordingly. The aide who came in to feed me daytime meals was married and weighed two hundred pounds. Same reaction.
I spent half my time trying not to have a bodily function and the other half embarrassed about it.
And life was boring. There was a TV in my room but it didn’t have a movie channel. Mostly, there was news and even V1 couldn’t take much of that. It was the same old thing over and over. I had the remote lying on my chest and after three weeks, they cut the cast back away from my fingers so I could carefully grasp the remote and push buttons. If I could have bent my elbows I could have used the bed urinal without help, but the doctors said that was at least a month more away.
“God, I miss my Kindle,” I sighed. I didn’t think anyone was around who could hear me. School had started while I was laid up and no one was coming by during the daytime. Mom even had a job doing some kind of office work that I didn’t pay attention to. I didn’t remember her having a job my first go-round. Dad worked in an assembly plant, just like he did before. I guess Mom’s job was part of this new reality I was in.
Em had brought me a couple of textbooks, but it was almost impossible to hold a book to read. And forget about writing. I’d probably have to make up the whole year. On the other hand, when I got out of here, I should be able to just breeze through school since I’d already done this once before. Not like I was a straight-A student, but I did well, went to college, and had a career. I should be able to handle high school in less time, right?
“Hey, J,” Em said as she came into the room. “How are your fingers working?”
“Pretty good. It’s still hard to hold a book, though. How’s school.”
“Boring as usual. Stupid teachers and stupider students. I brought you a present.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I brought your Kindle. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it sooner. I mean, your iPhone is trash. It’s what put the big gash in your right cheek when you got hit. I know you loved to read on your Kindle, though, so I figured you might even be able to find the textbooks on it.”
Porn, I thought.
And then I thought again.
My bed had a motor that allowed me to change the angle with a switch now that I had fingers. My room had a color television with a remote. My sister was holding her iPhone and handing me a Kindle. All these things were as natural to V1 as sunrise. How could they be so natural to V2? I was born in 1937. I was fourteen, almost fifteen in 1952. They didn’t have any of these things in 1952.
“Em? What year is it?”
“Dope! It’s 2018. Don’t tell me your head injury is making you forget when it is.”
In another timeline and reality, there is a fourteen-year-old you that is also lying in a coma.
You’d think they could have mentioned that in this reality my V1 timeline was all history. V1 was born October 17, 1937. V2 was born October 17, 2003.
I was fucked again.
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