Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 35 - Street View

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It was now two days since it all happened.

Frankie couldn’t stay in the apartment, walking the hall, rummaging through drawers, and losing himself in photographs illustrating an existence he’d long forgotten. If he waited much longer, he feared he’d never leave.  

He was nearly out of food, and the alcohol was already long gone.  He had already spent more time than he should have, wallowing in the situation alone, of suddenly standing in a long-gone version of his own body, with all his memories, beliefs, and mentalities intact.  On television, it was apparent more and more people were braving their way back into the world. However, Frankie felt paralyzed in ways, still utterly bereft of any fundamental understanding of what his wife had managed to unleash upon the world.  The answers were not going to come from the apartment.  Considering Becca had not yet returned, chances are she never would. 

It was time for some action. Something had to be done.  

He looked out the window down toward the streets, loosely clutching his Glock as he lightly tapped the gun’s barrel against his leg.  

He was dressed now, showered, and shaved.  That much he managed to do.  Slipping into a pair of Levi’s button-fly jeans made him chuckle as muscle memory kicked in, and he managed to pop the buttons into place effortlessly, one two three four, as if it hadn’t been years since he wore jeans without a proper zipper.  Even better, they were merely thirty-inch waist pants.  He’d been stuck in thirty-sixes for years, ever since turning fifty, after which he could never get it smaller, no matter how many miles he’d run.  His later years of proclivity for Scotch most likely hindered those efforts in the most disadvantageous manner.  

On the streets below, the typical sounds of a busy city at night swept upwards like disharmonious musical notes without a conductor to glide them into proper rhythm.  The noise was a constant blanket of anxiety-inducing flotsam, lacking meter.  Horns blared angrily, accompanied by regular crashing noises of scraping metal and shattered glass and the murmuring thump of bass lifting from speakers somewhere distant.  

It was no different than Frankie remembered, but the pattern of movement gave him pause.  

Cars stopped in the streets below for minutes at a time.  Drivers would empty from their seats and savagely attack each other, pulling passengers from other vehicles, grappling each other’s collars, and pummeling faces until only one person was running away, darting past other drivers who were exchanging similar blows.  People ran in clusters like busy ants on the sidewalks far below.  A father fanned out his arms like an umbrella, protectively trying to wrap them around his wife and children as he frantically ushered them through the escalating panic.  Each day, as more people ventured out, was worse than the day before.

Surely, Becca hadn’t planned for this.  She’d talked dreamily over the years of traversing years via her experiments, somehow manipulating timelines, but all for more significant causes and with purposes entirely singular.  Frankie, admittedly, never really believed it would ever be possible.  But he’d listen patiently as she prattled on.  

She’d never mentioned traversing the entire global population en masse, though. Had she not accounted for this possibility? It only made sense that society would be unable to sustain itself upon such a startling change. Becca would have known that.  

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How could an economy accustomed to one exchange rate suddenly amalgamate into another and not collapse?  How could a world used to the conveniences of more than four decades of financial, technological, and sociological progress not collapse upon itself amid being slingshot back into the past, erasing all progress but retaining the memories of the progress that had been made? It would be worse than mere confusion and chaos.  The mere lack of clarity regarding governmental entities, who was in charge, who was making decisions, of misrule and mob mentality, was enough to instantaneously create an environment of nihilism, rebellion, and chaos.  

In the absence of possessing that which people had been privileged to just mere hours before, there was nothing to stop people from trying to take back now what they believed was rightfully theirs.

Frankie worried about what he might be forced to do during this time if he joined the foray below.  He would now have to find out if he was ever to find Becca, let alone get more food.  

Though he’d managed to dress and even put on his shoes, he still felt paralyzed.  The television he usually hated had endlessly flickered throughout the night and into the morning with the now familiar nonstop litany of interviews with dead celebrities, social commentators still piecing together the puzzle of multiple hypotheses, and interviews with so-called experts.  A young Donald Trump was the first to step up and offer to serve as President after both George W. Bush and Barack Obama had already fallen victim to the violence that threatened to swallow the world.  Bill Clinton and Joe Biden immediately responded by calling on Congress — whoever that now be — to call for an emergency election.  Given that Ronald Reagan was not aware of the massive technological transitions in the world since his original death in 2004, all three candidates professed confidence in steering the world through the pending financial bubbles that would inevitably reoccur.

But were such collapses truly inevitable now?  Over these last hours, the world was like a virtual reality photo album, where everyone could step into their pasts and relive terrible fashion choices.  Between interviews and hastily produced documentaries, nostalgia poured from Hollywood in the form of old sitcoms and dramas that had been long forgotten but now aired on an unannounced schedule to keep people glued to their televisions.  In the days-old newspaper lying on Frankie’s kitchen table were advertisements for movies set to open in that week, of the Orioles, Mariners, and Yankees being the only teams to win their away games the previous Thursday night, of the continued celebrations surrounding the reopening of the Statue of Liberty in New York.    

But over these last quickly passing hours, hadn’t everything changed again? This wasn’t just a repeat of 1986, like rewinding old home movies on a VHS tape.  No, this was a version of 1986 where the tape had been wiped out, and a new film was being recorded.  

Since finding himself back in the old apartment, he’d watched more television than he’d watched in the entire decade combined before all this happened. He’d half-heartedly hoped Becca would suddenly appear at some point on the television, that she would show up at a station and inform them, “Not only do I know exactly what happened, but I’m the one who did it.”  

This hope kept him tethered to the television, making it difficult to turn it off and walk away.

Tapping the Glock against his leg one more time, Frankie nodded firmly.  Now.  Turn it off now.  

“Do something, Frankie Boy,” he said out loud, “even if you don’t have a clue what that might be.” 

He walked to the television and pushed the barrel of the gun against the power button, clicking it inward. Frankie sighed deeply.  

Tucking the Glock into the back of his pants and covering it with his shirt, Frankie turned his back on the television and walked out the apartment door.  

As the door closed behind him, Frankie didn’t notice the buzzing sound that faintly began emanating from the television on the other side.  Faint at first, the buzz turned to a crackle and, finally, a loud pop as the cathode ray tube inside exploded.  The television quickly collapsed, the sides crinkling like no more than paper as the glass screen splintered like a spiderweb.  In its place, a small black pinhole floated in the middle of the living room.

In the few seconds it took for all this to occur, Frankie was already in the stairwell heading toward the streets below.

End Part II

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