Letter Number Seven

              I went up to Fort Wayne to visit my mom and help her paint a couple of rooms this last weekend.  We painted the great room, foyer and hall on Friday night.  Mom found this new recipe online for homemade Moon Pies, and I had one after dinner.  Oh, man.  There’s a reason I have to battle my weight, and it’s not all Hashimoto’s Syndrome.  So I made a rule: no more Moon Pies at Mom’s house.  Especially when it’s too cold to run the next morning.

              So, on Saturday Mom had to work from 8am till noon.  We’d established that I would take the morning off to sleep-in and when she got home we would move her bedroom furniture and paint in there.  Instead, I got up at 8:15 and did it myself.  I finished painting her bedroom by 11:45 and was washing brushes and rollers at the sink, scraping at a crust of paint in the rolling pan with my thumb nail when I heard a familiar –POP—from the bedroom.  I dropped the paint pan into the sink and bolted through the dining room and great room, arrived at my mom’s bedroom doorway just as the second –POP—happened and a little burst of displaced air ruffled my hair.

              At the foot of Mom’s bed lay a blue rectangle.  Letter Number Seven:

              I vaguely recall those dandelions.  And the TV commercial I imagined myself making.  I’d just seen a car commercial the night before, and when I saw all those dandelions I just started selling them to a camera I imagined rising up above me, looking down, like the commercial for the car lot.  But I don’t remember thinking anything about god.

              Future Me is right about two things: first, that I am skeptical; and second, that rules are made to be broken.  I ate another Moon Pie as soon as I was done reading the letter.  Nothing like getting permission from your older self to break the rules.

              I’ve been pretty good lately.  I deserve it.  I’ve been running, lifting weights.  I surprise-painted Mom’s bedroom.  And I’ve been diligently (and secretly) sewing toaster-coils to a pair of underwear for two weeks now.  I think they’ll be ready for a test run in another week.

Letter Number Six

Since receiving Letter Number Five my days have become twitchier as I imagine every corner I approach is the one around which a Future Me is waiting in sabotage.  Every flash of black or shift in shadow at the edge of my periphery that I might have ignored before is now a reason to stop what I’m doing and go investigate, try to sneak up on one of my future selves and get him before he gets me, as if I could fool someone who’s already done everything I’m doing.  Who apparently maintains statistics.  But it’s impossible not to think I can catch him, isn’t it?  So I keep trying.

Friday morning, while moving some furniture into a banquet room, I heard a shuffling sound come from the kitchen.  It was only 6:30am, catering never arrives until 8 at the earliest.  I snuck over to the kitchen door, peeked over the lower edge of the tiny window.  All the lights were off in there, but I heard another shuffling sound and I thought what caterer is working in the dark and I threw open the door and cried out “CAUGHT YOU!” as I flipped the light switch.

The new Arts secretary let out a tiny scream and threw her tuna fish sandwich and bottle of diet cola straight up into the air.  After a moment of stunned silence, we began to apologize simultaneously; she wasn’t sure she was allowed to use the catering refrigerator, I thought she was someone else, we both laughed.  She picked up her sandwich and I retrieved her soda from where it had rolled to a stop.  I assured her it was fine to use the fridge and told her my name was Craig.

She paused.  Pursed her lips and pointed at me.  “Craig . . . Parker?”  I nodded.  “I have a letter for you.  It’s on my desk.”

I followed her on numb legs I hoped weren’t visibly shaking.  As she walked out to her desk, she continued: “It’s funny, I could’ve sworn it wasn’t there when I set my purse down, but then I went to take an aspirin, came back and it was right there.”

Then we were at her desk; the familiar blue rectangle glowing against the mahogany in the light from her computer monitor.  She walked around and picked it up.

“Such an odd color, you’d think I’d have noticed –“ she paused.  “Who’s Captain Spelunky and His Sack Lunch?”

I felt my face grow hot.  “Friend,” I said.  “Jokes, stupid . . . sorry.  And thanks.”  I began to back away, kept alternately apologizing and thanking her until she said “No problem, really,” and gave a little shoulder-height wave.  I turned and hurried to my closet where, once the door was closed, I could tremble and swear in private as I opened and read Letter Number Six.

The only thing I can think of worse than getting drunk with a crowd of Me of various ages is having to look at my own fat ass jiggling in a conga line in front of me.  Man, I must have been drunk.  I hate being naked in front of people.  Although, I guess if it was only me . . . not so bad, maybe?

And who is this “you” I talk about, as in “I gave you a hug . . . ?”  Is he talking about me?  August 1^st, 2012.  I guess I can make that.  Am I supposed to reserve the Community Center for this party?  I hope there’s not a deposit.

And another thing, that poem.  It’s clearly about my wife.  Why do I miss her so much?  Why don’t I just go home?  And, for that matter, where in the hell do I sleep?  If the current date never goes beyond May 22^nd, 2033, where . . . or, I guess, when – do I go to bed?  Shit!  Will this ever stop getting more confusing? 

87.65919 years.  I don’t know whether to be comforted or frightened by the thought that this year, my 38^th, will literally be mid-life for me.  Fuck.  Is this my crisis?  A psychotic episode?  Why couldn’t I just buy a sports car I can’t afford and dye the gray out of my beard?!

Oh, wait.  I just did the math.  38 X 2 = 76.  Not 87.  And I'm supposed to understand the mathematics of time travel?  I'd better work on multiplication first.  Baby steps, right?

I think the Universe may be in quite a bit of trouble with me mucking around with its mechanics.

Letter Number Five

I spent the weekend finishing with the garage.  Future Me was right; my wife was amazed.  In fact, she was suspicious for several days.  I think she was expecting me to ask for a big favor.  Every time I’d approach her about something, she’d immediately drop her head, furrow her brow and wait for me to drop the bomb.  I could see her mentally prepare to roll her eyes every time.  It was pretty gratifying to then ask if she needed help carrying laundry up from the basement or if she wanted me to fill her gas tank while I was out, and watch her blink a surprised expression onto her face, smile and say yes, or no, or who the hell are you, what have you done with my husband, and can you keep him there?

So, by Sunday afternoon I was done.  We ate dinner, put the girls to bed, then started to watch the Oscars.  At about 8:45, I sat up on the couch and told my wife I’d forgotten to pick up my prescription and needed to run out and get it.  She told me she’d let me know what I’d missed and I walked out the door.

Kohl’s always closes at 6pm on Sundays.  So I thought 8:45 was pretty safe.  I drove around to the back of the store, pulled up to the dumpster, fully expecting it would be padlocked shut.  It wasn’t.  I killed my headlights and engine, got out.  I looked around, saw no one and threw open the dumpster lid, shined my flashlight down inside.  Lots of boxes, plastic shipping wrap, a couple of bags of paper and there, underneath it all, mannequin limbs, torsos, and buttocks.  Jesus, they must have restocked the whole store.  I looked around again, saw no one, put the little flashlight in my teeth and lifted myself up onto the edge, tilted slowly forward and fell face-first inside, legs kicking uselessly.  I rolled over, found my footing, turned on the light and started throwing the crotch-sections of mannequins out of the dumpster.  I’d gotten about 6 and stood up with the last two, my head just above the metal lip, when the purple, blue and red of police strobes popped alight.  I turned to look towards my car and was blinded by a sudden spotlight.  I dropped instinctively back down, swearing under my breath.

There was the quick “WHOOP, WHOOP,” of the siren when they use it like a warning, then a voice over a mega-phone: “Come on out, son, we’ve got the dumpster surrounded.  Hands where we can see ‘em.” 

Fuck, I thought, how the hell am I going to explain this to Jen?  I stood up, raised my hands, dropped the last two crotches I was still holding and turned towards the light.  “Come on out, slow now.”  I put my hands on the lip, hoisted myself up again, thought too late about how I’d ended up before, tilted slowly forward, legs flailing, and flipped forward out of the dumpster, completing the flip and hitting the ground on my ass.  There was the immediate sound of laughter, from three or four places around me, followed immediately by the sound of several strange POP! sounds happening in quick succession.  After a stunned second with my hand up to shield my eyes from the spotlight, I knew what had happened.  I screamed: “God damn it!”  I stood and walked to my car, turned off the spot that had been clamped to my driver’s window, and saw by the light of the bubble strobes still turning on my car’s roof the blue envelope stuck under my windshield wiper.

Letter Number Five:

Well, that explains the multiple voices laughing at me as I got out of the dumpster, doesn’t it?  Jesus, as if there weren’t enough of me already.  And am I really supposed to look forward to all this hazing I’m apparently going to subject my younger selves to?  Man.  I got one thing right, at least: my future self is a Dick.

Letter Number Four

Today, while Johnny-mopping the toilets in the Student Union –plunge swirl scritcha scritcha—I finally came to articulate a thing that had bothered me since the first letter, but I’d been afraid to admit to myself:  I wouldn’t build a time-travelling pair of underwear to confront my father. 

There it was.  I mean, I guess it’s true that, if I had the capability already, I’d go back and do it, sure.  But I wasn’t thinking about time-travel before that first letter arrived, and I certainly wasn’t obsessed about my dad.  He and I’ve been talking regularly for four or five years now, I feel pretty good about him, quite frankly.  And even now, knowing that I’m capable of inventing time-travel, I don’t feel particularly driven by the idea of seeing my 24 year-old dad.

So there must have been an Original Me who was driven, right?  Who arrived at this time in his life and decided he had to invent time travel.

And then I had a second realization, one that dropped my jaw and stopped my Johnny-mop mid-scritcha: It’s the WAY the letters are written!  Sure, future me acknowledges the existence of the letters within the letters, but not enough.  He doesn’t show their true influence.  For example: I credit having read the letter with stopping me from smoking a cigarette after my dad runs off in front of the hospital, and then with reminding me to go upstairs and hold my infant self.  BUT!  In the second letter, I pretend that I had to tail Mom and M.B. for six days, when in reality all I had to do was check the date and time in the text, adjust the dials and BAM!  I’m there.  In the third letter, waiting around the corner for 3 hours?  Come on!  I’ll have spent 22 years with these letters, I’ll know every moment of them.

So.  They’re half-written as though I’m experiencing them for the first time, and half the future me who lives with the letters for a third of his life.  Which told me two things: there definitely was an Original Me who created time-travel, experienced all of it for the first time, wrote about his trips, then felt compelled to communicate with his past self for some reason.  And that’s when the paradox begins, this closed loop of the letters’ influence.  The second thing it told me was that my future self has been lying to me.  I clearly have the ability and willingness to rewrite portions of the letters, but I’m preserving the voice of that Original Me for some reason.  I whispered aloud to myself, my toilet brush still frozen between scritchas: “Why?”

I heard a –POP!—from the sink area just outside the stall I was in, then the squeak of a shoe-sole on the tile, but I was slow to react.  By the time I even thought about poking my head out to peek, the second –POP!—happened, and I stepped out into an empty restroom.  Empty except for a blue envelope leaned against the wall-length mirror above the line of sinks. 

I walked over and picked up Letter Number Four:

After I fell out of the car, I had this vision of myself bouncing like a fish on the line over the water, only the water was made of little stones and the fish was made of me.  It was immediately comic to me, in the way that Daffy Duck being shot in the face by Elmer Fudd and only having to twist his beak back around as a consequence was funny.  And like cartoon logic bends the laws of physics to its own ends, I took my ability to hold onto that door handle as proof that I could, on occasion at least, achieve the impossible.  Like read minds or fly.  Or convince a girl to let me see her naked.  Or hit a baseball. 

I did eventually see a naked girl.  And I haven’t let go of the rest.  I’ve got a good grip.

Future me, I don’t exactly get what you’re talking about at the end of this letter yet.  But I’m pretty sure I can handle it.  So bring it on, dude.  Drop some bombs.

Letter Number Three

I haven’t received a letter in over a week, so I’ve been rereading the first two.  A lot.  Too much.  I decided to limit myself to once a day, and so of course I’ve already read them twice this morning.  And since I’ve broken the rule, I’ll undoubtedly read them again tonight.  And at lunch.  Man, I’ve got to get a grip.  It makes me feel a bit manic when I read them so much, and mania doesn’t help me hide all this from my wife.  It’s bad enough that I think I’m losing my mind.  The last thing I need is for her to agree.  I can handle this.  I will not make this the center of my life.

Of course, the more I push it out of the center, the more it becomes the only thing I focus on and the center follows it.  I don’t know how many times I caught myself Friday vacuuming the same patch of corner carpet again and again, like a malfunctioning robot caught in a short-circuit.  Bump bump bump my vacuum against the same three feet of baseboard while I try to puzzle out what a Phlubbalubbanator might do, what the hell it means to ridiculously fixate, if time-traveling underwear that collapses and expands one’s subatomic structure does any lasting damage to Spacedude and the Astronuts.  Are the underwear lead-lined to protect from radiation?  Would that matter?  Boxer or brief?  And how does one test them?  Do I send white lab rat testes through time, then check them with a Geiger counter?  How do I feel, ethically, about my responsibility for all these potentially ball-less rats?  Or does my future me even give a shit about our ethical or testicular integrity?  That thought sends me into a bit of a panic.  I thought I’d always have my sex-drive, but what if I lose it and I suddenly don’t care about sacrificing the Balledwin Brothers to science?  And that’s when I come back to the world and realize that I’ve not only been vacuuming the same swath of carpet for five minutes, I’ve cupped my hand protectively over my crotch, have had it there for god knows how long.  Not the best pose for a janitor to be caught in, right?  Fondling himself with a look of panic on his face?

Luckily, no one’s seen me yet.  I think.  Although would I know?  One of the professors gave me a strange glance as she was passing earlier in the week.  I’d stopped myself mumbling aloud a moment before: how stupid do I think I am, Barbie Helmets and toaster coils and a pair of Hanes, I must think I’m a CHILD, I’m not—and I didn’t know if she’d heard me, so I smiled and mumbled an apology I hoped was unnecessary.  Then I went to my closet and had a quiet fit of swearing.

I’m almost always home alone for lunch, so I get to freak out a little in private.  I decided to read them aloud Friday, for the first time, really.  And that was when I noticed it.  It had been there the whole time, but it hadn’t registered till I heard myself say it. 

In the second letter, the heading above February 10^th reads: TIME VOYAGE:  46.  I stopped after I read it aloud, flipped back to the first letter to make sure.  45 trips between the two.  What were those about?  And then I saw the thing that has come to bother me most.  The CURRENT DATE of each trip.  May 22^nd, 2033.

I said aloud to myself: “I took 45 voyages through time in one day?  Come on!  How stupid do I think I am?”

That’s when I heard a loud -POP- from the kitchen, then a prolonged crash as half the stuff on our island hit the floor.  My first thought was that my wife was home, so I scooped the letters together and stuffed them under the couch cushions.  I stood and walked down the east hall to the kitchen, saw the mess on the floor, knives and magazines and bread.  I made the sighing sound she hates so much (breathy and loud, with a little death rattle at the end for flavor), then said “Hey, honey, what happened?”  I heard the creek of the floorboards in the living room.  Then another -POP!  No crash that time.

I walked the circuit of hall back out to the living room, expected to see my wife opening tennis ball canisters, Pringles cans, something to explain that weird, airless clap.  There was no one.  But there was a blue envelope in the middle of the coffee table.  With the answer to my question scrawled in black on the outside. 

Letter Number Three:

Oh man.  The Tigger and Pooh shoes on the wrong feet.  I remember why I did that.  Tigger was my left shoe, but my right foot was my favorite.  It felt like a betrayal to wear him on my left foot.  Left foot was for Pooh. 

I couldn’t explain to Mom when she asked me why they were always on the wrong feet.  She kept telling me that the curves of the soles should match the curves of my feet.  I knew that.  I knew she must think I was stupid.  But I also knew it wouldn’t matter if I told her why.  The world made rules for shoes without concern for my opinion, and the world condemned Tigger to the left shoe.  Mom clucked her tongue and tied them tight to the correct feet.  Pooh gloated from my right toe: Told you so.  That tubby little fucker.

My future/psychotic self is right.  I’m in.  I’m going to start attaching toaster coils to some old undies tomorrow at lunchtime.  And I’m not going to fight the urge to think about this anymore.  The other 4, 995 square feet of carpet be damned!  I’ve got to vacuum the corner for an hour and figure out why I take 45 voyages through time on the same day, why it’s even possible.  I’ve got to know what it means that I’ve been writing these letters to my selves at all.  How many selves this might mean there have been.  Future selves writing to past selves, who in the future write to past selves, who in the future . . . jesus. 

Tomorrow.  I’m giving up.  Time to fixate.  Ridiculously.

Letter Number Two

Unlike the first letter, which could have been entirely fabricated by someone dedicated to doing some absurdly thorough research, this second letter contains enough significant detail that someone else having written it seems implausible.  I might have told this story before, but only to a few people, and never like this.  Someone would have had to make some incredibly accurate guesses.  Which means: either I really am a time-traveling janitor, or I really am having some kind of mental breakdown.  This is no joke, that’s for sure.  I need to start asking my future self (or my psychotic self) some serious questions about my underwear.  Here's Number Two:

I really thought he was my father.  Until I was nine years old, and my mom told me my real dad lived in California. 

The day mom kicked M.B. out of the trailer, I remember yelling, lots of it.  I came out to the living room from my room, mom was in a white terrycloth robe, her hair wrapped in a towel.  I sat on the couch while they fought, grew more and more scared.  I've always remembered it like I was watching it in 3^rd person, like I was already a future me floating by the light fixture, mom came back to the couch and threw herself down beside me, pointed at M.B. and screamed at him get out and don’t come back!  And I saw myself bawling, and so was she, and I remember M.B. standing in the doorway looking back at us, and I thought why is he smiling?  And then he was out and the door slammed, and I watched myself throw my arms around mom’s impossibly thin neck and we sobbed.  I don't remember stopping, but we must have.

Years later, I’d know that when people cry really hard, sometimes they look like they’re smiling, and I grew more certain that M.B. must have been crying too when he was standing at the door.  He must have been, right?

You’re right future me.  Or crazy me.  I don’t want to see that again.  Fuck.  What’s happening to me?

Letter Number One

I found this letter inside my front door on Monday, February 7th, 2011. I thought it was a fake, but now I'm not so sure.  I've received a second letter since, on the 10th.  I'm a little freaked out, a little excited.  If it's real, it's the craziest thing that's ever happened to me, to anyone maybe.  And if not . . . well, it's still the craziest thing that's ever happened to me.  Alright, enough from me.  Here's the first letter from the future:

Dude.  What do you make of that?  I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it.  Whether it's real or not, the author is right about one thing: I'd never let my dad off the hook like that!  I'd do whatever I had to just to keep him around.

True or not, I've got a lot of thinking to do.  And it just gets weirder in the next letter.  I'll post it tomorrow, after I have a chance to scan it in.  And after I see about finding that toaster in my garage.