Note: Way back when I published the last installment in the time travel series, my friend Travis Cherniss said he liked these and to keep them coming. I appreciated his kind words but apparently not enough to keep months and months from going by before getting inspired to write a new one. Sorry for the delay, Travis.
“Well,” said my scientist friend, “we have a problem.” We as in you and me? I asked, but he said no, we as in me and Janis Joplin. Weird, I said. I told him he could have given me a thousand guesses and it would have taken me eight or nine hundred to get to Janis Joplin. What, I asked, is the problem the two of you have? I hoped he wasn’t going to say she was pregly.
“There was a glitch,” he said. “I accidentally transported her to the Ostrogothic Kingdom in the late fifth century. I can’t seem to get her back to the reality I transported her from.”
“Is this going to have repercussions for the current time-space continuum?”
“Do you have any idea what you just said?”
“I know lazy sitcom writers expect laughs just for mentioning the time-space continuum.”
“True. But no, it shouldn’t affect our reality. What will most likely happen is that the Ostrogoths are going to pioneer blues rock.”
“Big Theodoric and the Holding Company.”
He rolled his eyes and said I should come back when I learned enough about the Ostrogoths to be dangerous cause I wasn’t quite there yet. “Anyway,” he added, “that’s not why I asked you over. Take a look in that box on the counter.”
I looked and found an old transistor radio from the ‘60s. “Hey, it’s got a leatherette case with holes in it so you can listen right through the holes.” He spread his hands and said what? “Allan Sherman?” I said. “Twelve Days of Christmas?”
“Actually,” he said, “it’s a portable version of the time machine. My gift to you. It’s a stripped-down model, though. The only thing you can do with it is bring your past self here so you can regale him with your outdated pop culture references.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Something-ish. By the way, I sent you a link to a video that shows you how to work it.” Then he saw the look on my face and sighed and said he’d also write out the instructions. I thanked him profusely and he reminded me to be sure I wasn’t in public when I brought my past self back.
“I’ll be careful,” I said, “but remember what Chekhov said: ‘If there’s a reference to a time-travel glitch in Act One, there’ll be an actual time-travel glitch in Act Two.’”
My scientist friend shook his head. “Are there people who actually look forward to your newsletter?”
* * *
So I was careful to follow the instructions and bring my younger self back in a fairly secluded place. Young Dono showed up in a white leisure suit and a silk shirt with pyramids all over it and a wide open collar. “Holy cow,” I said, “where were you?”
“On my way to a jazz band concert,” he said.
“Which one?”
“Countryside Inn out on the east edge of Crawfordsville.”
I remembered the concert and the audience comprised of parents and unsuspecting patrons. I also remembered the leisure suit. I had owned three leisure suits during my teenage years. The other two were beige and powder blue so the white one was the most stylish by default.
“That was a fun gig,” I said. “And hey, do you ever think there’s going to be some cute jazz-loving townie at these shows who will be so enamored of the bass trombone player in the white leisure suit that she slips you her number?”
Young Dono perked up. “Is this the show where that happens?”
“No.” Poor kid and his romantic fantasies. I remembered them vividly too.
“Ah well,” he said. “What are we going to talk about this time? And can we hit a McDonalds?”
“We can. And today I’m going to give you some tips on college life.”
As we drove to McDonalds I we discussed some of the vagaries of time travel—not the Jules Verne kind or the Avengers kind or the Bill and Ted kind but the kind developed by my scientist friend. Each time the young version of me showed up, he retained the memories of what we discussed before. When he returned to 1977, he returned to the exact moment he left—which meant he was never sure that it had happened or not. This, I said, creates an infinite number of paradoxes.
“Like it’ll feel like I’ve eaten a couple of Big Macs but I know I haven’t been to McDonalds?”
“That’s one. I think.”
We ordered and sat at an empty table far from the Playplace and he asked me to tell him about Wabash College. “Like what classes am I going to take?”
“First semester you’re in English 7, History and Drama, with Don Herring.”
“Is he nice?”
That seemed like an odd thing to ask but then I remembered that a professor’s intellect and subject expertise would not have been a huge concern for young me. At the time I would have been more worried about being publicly dressed down for saying something stupid. “Yes,” I assured Young Dono, “you’ll find Don Herring quite nice and likable. You’ll also notice that he refers to the left nut a lot, as in ‘Bertolt Brecht would have given his left nut to do such-and-such.’ In fact, you’ll jot down a left-nut scoreboard in the front of your notebook.”
“He didn’t get in trouble for that?”
“Ah. That’s one big difference between high school and college. And here’s another one: Back in 1978 students could still smoke in class.”
“Gross. Do we sit next to any of them?”
“I can’t remember. But if we did, I can assure you they didn’t ask if we minded.”
“OK—what other classes?”
“Russian 1—”
“Russian, wow, no kidding? So you can speak Russian?”
“Nyet. I’ve retained enough to be able to pronounce words when I see them, but honestly it’s a tough language to learn. If the different alphabet and weird-ass silent letters don’t get you, the gender and case endings will. One thing I can say in Russian is Ya ne gavaroo pa-russki.”
“Which means?”
“I don’t speak Russian.”
Young Dono thought that was funny, which, of course, I knew he would. But he then said he didn’t really need a list of classes as much as he wanted to know What Is College Like?
“In our case,” I said, “it’s two different culture shocks. One that’s quite affirming, one that will weigh you down with self-doubt. There’s this feeling you get when you’re walking across campus on a crisp fall day and you know the paper you’ve written for your freshman tutorial is perfect, or when you’re in a lecture hall hearing about a topic you never knew existed before. It makes you feel like you’ve made a successful transition, like you’ve left your old high school self behind, like you’re entering this wide-open dimension of knowledge. And on the opposite side there’s the feeling of sitting in a classroom where the discussion is being dominated by people who just love the sound of their own voice. There’s the assumption that because you’re away from home you must make up for lost time in the area of beer consumption. There’s the feeling—which goes into the negative column at first but eventually slides over into the positive—that what you learned in Sunday School might not match up with reality. Sometimes you’ll feel like you belong, sometimes you’ll feel like packing it in.”
“It’s a little scary.”
“I remember. Today I tell people I wasn’t ready, that I needed to understand the world more before attempting to understand what Wabash wanted to teach me. But I made it through and I appreciate my education—probably a little more every day. You’ll do the same.”
“I hope—”
Our attention was drawn to a redhead approaching our table. She wore big round glasses, a crocheted vest, and a tank top. “Hey, dudes,” she said in a raspy Texas drawl, “you guys aren’t Ostrogoths, are you?”
I said no while Young Dono said what’s an Ostrogoth. Ms Joplin sat down and shook her head. “Wow, man,” she said. “There’s a serious bummer going on in the time-space continuum.”
Come get me in your time machine, or bring Janis to me, Jono. I like the story and want more!