Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 55 - Migration

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“I feel as though I shouldn’t be here,” Gordon said as he awkwardly stood in the living room, staring out the expansive windows at the still, slow-moving traffic outside. 

He was overwhelmed with the distinct feeling of walking through a movie or a play.  Everything felt real, and yet beyond belief, he gazed upon the deep orange and blue dawn reflecting upon the high-rise across the street, so very much different from the dying steel town that was the smallness of Burkett, Pennsylvania.  Was this the same sunrise as forty years prior, unchanged yet repeating without even knowing it?  The exact mirrored reflection upon the sleek glass windows?  Was this apartment as empty forty years ago on this day, or was it as sterile and cold as it was at that moment?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Becca said, stopping at a corner of the room that lead down into a shadowy hallway.  Surprisingly, she was the talkative one throughout their trek, but nervously so, her words ringing false and forced in Gordon’s ears. “Make yourself comfortable.  I’ll just be a moment.”

It was early morning still, the minutes where sunrise was just a sliver of light, but pervasive and moving from one moment to the very next, a slight and unexpected chill in the air outside that took Gordon by surprise when they climbed out of the car he’d first driven from Pennsylvania to Key West and now on to Chicago.  

It was even colder in the small apartment. The air conditioning blared, pushing a frigid draft throughout the room that washed Gordon’s bare arms in gooseflesh. He wondered who would be responsible for paying the electric bill in a place like this. Was ownership still enforceable in this new world, let alone provable?   

His mind moved nearly incessantly to thoughts of Charlie, his face of bristly white whiskers and deep-seated wrinkles, wordlessly sitting at his small kitchen table alone.  He wouldn’t even offer a goodbye in return when they thanked him for his hospitality.

“It’s nothing personal,” Becca had told him, yet Charlie just stared back at her with dark eyes. The words “USS Randolph, CV-15” were embroidered in dark yellow thread above the brim of his ball cap, now pulled low, draping his face in shadow.  

Gone was his easy grin, generously given.  In it’s place was a face pockmarked with fearfulness, his wrinkled skin sallow and ominous, hanging.  You could see the fear in his eyes, tenuous like cancer.  Charlie, who’d bore down on those black holes randomly floating throughout the Gulf Stream, was afraid.  

“I appreciate your friendship, Charlie,” Gordon said, and extended his hand.  “You helped me more than you could know.”

Charlie slapped Gordon’s hand away and stood abruptly from the table.  

“Lock the door on your way out,” he said as he swiped his can of beer from the tabletop and walked out the patio door.

“I hate to leave this way,” Gordon said to Becca.

“You don’t have to come along with me,” she replied, but her tone was unconvincing. “I’d understand if you stayed.”

“I’m torn,” Gordon said.  “I am.  I mean, if we’re to do what you’re suggesting, if you think there’s something that can be done to reverse all this, then aren’t we sentencing Charlie to death?”

“Charlie, he was already dead,” Becca said.  

“Excuse me?”

“There’s a choice here that we have to consider — a few choices, actually. Either we resolve that this is the new way of living forever, stuck in 1986 and doomed to repeat our lives just as before in some warped mirror image of what already happened, or we figure out a way to reverse it all, to go back to where we were, and try to move forward from there.”

“How can you be certain everything will be as it was?” Gordon asked. “Wouldn’t we remember all of this that’s now happened?  Being out in the boat with Charlies?  How could we ever feel stable again?  I’m not sure I could.”

“Point taken,” Becca said.  “But isn’t that a chance worth taking?”

“And we’re the ones to decide that for the entire world?” Gordon asked.  “I don’t think that’s our right.”

“Well to not choose is to choose nothing,” Becca said.  

“And you want to choose to reset it all?”

“This isn’t what was supposed to happen,” Becca replied. “It was supposed just to be me.  Not the entire world.  I was supposed to traverse time.  And even then, it was only to try to fix some of the mistakes I’d made in my marriage.  That’s it.”

“No, that’s just selfish,” he said, shaking his head.

Gordon crossed his arms and stared at her, perplexed, his head titled as if trying to discern the meaning of a neo-cubist painting on a museum wall.

“It’s like you don’t hear the words coming out of your own mouth,” Gordon said.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you not realize the ramifications your actions have had on the rest of the world?  On the rest of us?”

“Of course I do,” Becca said. “I’m acutely aware of what I’ve done, and that’s why it’s up to me to fix it.”

“Is it?” Gordon asked. “Because, quite frankly, I like having the chance to do things over again — to have a younger body and a fresh start.  I was glad to meet Charlie and go on the ocean in his boat.  I was starting to think I could make a go of things back there in Key West.”

“Even as black holes were popping up all over?”

“Well, I had no idea what those things were.  Or are.  I still don’t, until you showed up.  But the fact of the matter is that it was up to me to discover whether or not it was something I wanted to concern myself with.  It was up to me to figure out how to pull up my bootstraps and move forward.  And the fact that I’d left Pennsylvania for the first time in my life, headed out into the unknown, and tried to move on from something I’d been unable to move on from for over forty years, well, I was pretty proud of myself.”

“Your wife,” Becca said.

“That’s right,” Gordon said.  “Marie.  She was the best thing to ever happen to me.  And when we were all zapped back here, I found myself getting ready to bury her all over again.  This is a clean slate for me.  A fresh start to live my life the way Marie would have wanted me to, rather than to live like a captive of grief for the rest of my life.  That’s exactly what I was doing before all this.  But now you — and you alone — seem to think it’s your choice to send me and everyone else back to where we were before.  And maybe that’s not what we want.  Maybe Charlie’s right in that regard.  It sometimes takes me a while to see things straight, but after listening to you all night, I think I see it now.”

“Fine,” Becca said.  “Then don’t come with me.  Go back to Charlie.”

But it was too late.  Now, he was in Becca’s own apartment in Chicago, which she shared with her husband of over forty years.  This confused Gordon, the fact that Becca had remained married for so many years yet seemingly took no issue with trekking solo across the country without her husband after the single most disruptive event in human history.   To abandon someone like that was absurd to Gordon, unsettling. However, despite spending hours in a car with her, the details of Becca’s life were still somehow unattainable and unapproachable, closed off and private. However, he’d more than willingly shared his tragedy of losing Marie and then losing her again.

Thinking of Marie, of abandonment, his thoughts flittered again to his mother-in-law, Delores, and the fact that she was still living and breathing in this world once more, several hundreds of miles east of Chicago.  He should try to call again to check on her, he thought.  But she was most certainly still there, breathing, most likely sitting in her small apartment with her cat Rascal dozing in her lap.  

Delores’s final directive was to grab hold of the opportunity presented to Gordon, this second chance at youth after four decades of grief.  So that’s what brought him to Florida, only to abandon Charlie to a solitary life once again amongst the streets of Key West.  Was this living?  Is this what Delores wanted of him? To chase after something again that he didn’t even want, to help Becca reverse it all, to go back to the way things were when he was old and tired and left for dead in an oil-soaked and rank alleyway behind a decrepit gas station?

“The gun is gone,” Becca said, storming back into the room.  Gordon jumped, startled at the sound of her voice.  “Frankie must have taken it.”

“You scared me,” Gordon said, turning his back to the floor-to-ceiling window.  

“And we always kept an envelope of petty cash here in the apartment for emergencies,” she said annoyed.  “That’s gone, too.”

“Does that matter?” Gordon asked.  “I mean, if you’re to reset all this?”

Becca looked him straight in the eyes, piercing, her mouth pulled upward as if she’d just smelled something rotten.

“Gordon, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Becca said.  “I don’t even know if there’s anything I can do anymore.  But if I’m to do anything, there’s somewhere else we need to be.”

Gordon shuffled his feet nervously.  

“And to get there, I’d feel a lot safer if I had that gun,” Becca said.

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