Escaping fate, p.19
Escaping Fate, page 19
"The decisions get bigger and bigger. What car you drive. Where you go on vacation. What clothes you need, she needs, the kids need. Where you want to live, what house you buy, what changes you make to the house. What you need and don't need, what you spend money on day-to-day. What are your kids allowed to do, what are they not. What job you take, what career you pursue. How you spend your free time. Whether you show up to work or do something that she decided is more important. Then, 10, 20, 30 years later, you're in a position you never wanted to be in. You look back and you've wasted the best years of your life. Your goals, and aspirations, and dreams are all lost. They were never on this path you're walking. They're on a different path that you can't even see anymore because you took a fork in the road way back there, that led you to where you wound up.
"When you don't make your own decisions, they get made for you. And letting that happen is actually a decision unto itself—though it doesn't seem like it at the time. Some decisions lead to changes that are more permanent than you would ever guess. Or you don't appreciate how permanent they are. Because when you're young, you just assume there's more than enough time for everything; and you can always correct your mistakes later. But the opportunities you forsook along the way...they're gone forever."
Dad's gaze shifted from me to the rear view mirror. "If I had only known, at your age, what I know now..." He sighed, and looked through the windshield—at what, I couldn't tell. "Think about every decision you make, Sprout, before you make it. Even if it seems small or unimportant. And make sure you get to know a person well before you trust them enough to let them influence your decisions."
I didn't appreciate the gravity of that advice right then. But I remembered it.
Being too literal for my own good sometimes, my mind would occasionally visualize what he meant as metaphors. Like the Ziggurat, or these pathways he just warned me about. In my mind's eye, I might see some new person I met standing at the fork in a road. Or some decision to make was represented in similar fashion. Right then, for instance, I imagined a path that split into two directions. Both had football jerseys hanging from poles like flags. One jersey had a quarterback's number, the other had a running back's number. I loved playing both roles. Which should I choose?
At least my young mind could grasp the concept. What I didn't fully grasp yet was that the paths available to me might be more important than what happened with regards to football.
When I left St. Louis behind, along with the life I had known there, that was also a fork in the road. I assumed that was the most important turn I would ever take in life—perhaps even the only one.
(It would not be the only one.)
Something else snapped into place in my conscious thoughts: I was getting a do-over. A new start at life, as a new person, who could build himself into what he wanted to be.
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Sneak Peek from Rebooting Fate
MY SPANISH WASN'T GOOD enough yet to follow such a rapid-fire conversation, with advanced vocabulary. Still, I wouldn't characterize it as an argument.
Mami sounded confused, sad, and worried. She never argued with Dad—at least that I ever saw. Dad took good care of her, and she was easy to please anyway. Whatever disagreements they might have had must have been resolved quickly and respectfully, because they were never angry with each other. But that morning she was distraught, and pleading, while Dad was resolute and unmoving.
I stepped outside the adobe hacienda into the warm California air and the scent of citrus. I'd never seen Mami unhappy and didn't know how to handle it. As much as I would have liked to restore her to her normal happy state of mind, this was grownup business and I had no jurisdiction, I strolled into the nearest row of orange trees. Quick as Tarzan, I climbed my favorite tree up to the highest branch that would support my weight. Normally I would read a comic book or one of Dad's pulp magazines at my normal perch. This time I just took a seat and swung my feet back and forth.
I had witnessed more than my share of grownup bickering, and preferred to be somewhere else when it took place. Back in 1988 St. Louis, my biological parents argued just about whenever they saw each other. It wasn't all that often, so I was thankful for that. Evidently they could only put up with each other long enough to make a baby. Then it was all downhill from there.
When the Erasers murdered my biological family, I was shocked and sad for a while, but I didn't miss them—except for Abel, my younger half-brother, sometimes,
I shifted my gaze from the huge, flat-roofed adobe structure over to the fake barn that housed Dad's “Temperature Wheel”—the ingenious engine that turned the generator which powered the estate. To the south of both structures was a separate, enormous building with multiple garage bays. Some were garages, some were aircraft hangars. Dad kept them all under lock and key, not so much because thieves might find their way to the Orange Grove, but because some of the vehicles he stored there had not been conceived or manufactured yet.
Before I get too far along, I should probably explain that “Dad” was really my Uncle Simon. Even before my rescue from the time-traveling assassins who erased the existence of my family, my uncle had lifted me out of a pretty bleak childhood. It wasn't him who saved me from the Erasers, though. That was one of his doppelgängers. Yeah—it gets confusing.
And no, the little Mexican woman inside the house wasn't my "real" mother, either—though she was, as far as I was concerned.
They came outside, now, Dad's arm around her shoulders. She looked to the left, then the right, and called out, "Pedrito?"
"Ya viene, Mama!" I replied, scrambling down the tree.
I hit the ground running toward her. She wiped her eyes and spread her arms, leaving Dad behind by a few paces. When I reached her, she embraced me with the warmth and affection I had become addicted to in a short time. I hugged her back and she planted kisses on my forehead.
"Oh Mijo, I mees you already!" she cried, giving me an intense squeeze. She let go and stepped back, taking my hands and meeting my gaze. Her brown eyes were glossy and edged with sadness. She switched to Spanish, but spoke slowly so I could follow. "Don't ever forget that this is your home, Pedrito. Don't ever forget that I love you and I am here for you. If you ever need anything, come home."
"Dad says I'll get to see you every weekend, Mamita," I said.
"Don't act like such a grown man—weekends are not enough! This house will be so empty without you, my precious one."
I didn't know what to say. I wanted to stay here with Mami anyway, but Dad was sure he had a better arrangement.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you too, Mami," I said.
I knew nothing at all about love, with this one exception: I loved her. She was the best mother anyone could ever hope for. Were it not for football and Gloria Benake, Dad would have had to pry me away from 1934, and this woman.
Football.
Just months ago (in relative time) I had been indifferent toward the game. Now it was my obsession. Not just because it was simulated combat—although I did like that aspect of it. There was something else about it that appealed to me that I couldn't identify. It was more than a game. More than a sport. On a football team you were part of something. I had never been part of anything.
I wasn't great at punting or kicking, but I had good hands and could catch the ball if it came anywhere near me. I could run the ball too. And when it came to passing, I could really sling that pigskin. I thrived on solving the tactical problems presented by the other team. My instincts led me to call the right plays in most situations. A shoo-in for quarterback, right?
But my Achilles' Heel was my leadership ability...or lack thereof. Dad had broken the bad news to me that I was a loner, not a leader. I had bristled at this pronouncement, but he was probably right. I had been alone more often than not as far back as I could remember. I had pals at school, but never really any deep friendships. Nobody in my biological family valued my company. I was alienated and socially inept back in my old life, for lack of healthy models to emulate. When very young, I hated my isolation. By the time Dad came into my life, I had come to prefer it most of the time.
Without much experience functioning in a group, and an acquired disinterest in it, of course I was clueless about how to lead one. So I wasn't a natural leader, by any sober evaluation. But maybe leadership could be learned.
Dad and I watched movies together, periodically. Typically we watched them twice in a row, playing armchair anthropologist. I didn't say much on the second viewing, mostly listening to Dad's analysis. He pointed out specific human interactions and compared them to what happens in real life. If they were realistically depicted, he would pass judgment on how smart, right, and/or effective the characters' words and actions were. I learned a lot from his commentary about group dynamics while watching war movies. I had learned some leadership principles already, just in the months since I had come to know him.
Maybe I could rebuild myself. If I learned the lessons Dad was teaching me, perhaps I could be a part of something great. Maybe I could become a great quarterback—and not just in my own mind. I wanted to rise to the level that coaches, other players, people who watched games...they would recognize not only that I was part of something, but I was also great at something. Something I loved.
Normally, I was as uninterested in validation as I was in social interaction. But I wanted validation in this one area. I wanted it bad.
Dad and I climbed into his big Duesenberg roadster and drove off to start a new life, while Mami stood in the drive, waving goodbye.
The warm wind pulled gently at my hair as we drove down the long gravel driveway. When we were no longer within sight of Mami and the house, Dad opened a panel on the dashboard, cued up our new coordinates on the warp interface, and initiated the jump.
"Jumping" through a dimensional warp to different space-time coordinates gives you the sensation of driving into a swirling vortex that swallows up all sight and sound for a moment. When your eyes and ears latch back onto what seems normal, you're somewhere else, somewhen else.
In this case, we were on a lonely road outside Bakersfield in 1953.
The road took us to a warehouse Dad owned in a burgeoning industrial park, where he swapped the Doozy for his hopped-up '41 Willys. We drove that into the residential neighborhood where Dad owned a typical middle class home with front-and-back yards.
"I've been thinking about the Big Spooky," I said, now that the wind noise didn't interfere with conversation.
"Oh yeah?" Dad replied, eyebrows raised. He was the first adult I remember ever taking an interest in what I thought about anything.
"What if it has something to do with the Erasers?"
He already looked skeptical.
The Big Spooky was something he introduced me to during our summer vacation. At certain coordinates, I would feel some kind of overwhelming sensation of dread for no apparent reason. It always felt momentous, or tumultuous. Sometimes the flavor was downright repulsive. Other times, it had an almost seductive quality. Dad had encountered it before and conducted an impromptu experiment to see if I felt it at the same times and places he did.
"Hear me out," I said, "okay? The government covered up whatever happened in Roswell in 1947. Right? Wouldn't the Erasers want to cover it up, too? I mean, if somebody was able to get the story out about what really happened, that could cause a split in the timestream. So the Erasers have to wipe out whoever had the real story, witnesses, and whoever else knew them. And we feel the Big Spooky there because of the deaths."
Dad didn't say anything right away, so I pushed on.
"Same thing at Jeckyll Island. Somebody found out what they were doing, and was gonna blow the whistle. Boom. In come the Erasers. That's the obvious conclusion for the JFK assassination, right? The Olympiad? I mean, the Nazis had all kinds of secrets that could have split the timestream if the world found out what they were planning before the war even started. And maybe there was some technology that couldn't be shown at the World's Fair. If it had, it might have led to a split in the stream, so the Erasers had to kill off whoever would have introduced that tech."
Dad sighed, but kept his tone bright. "I don't think so, Sprout. I've been around enough death to know that, by itself, it doesn't cause the Big Spooky. Was the Big Spooky there at the trailer park when the Erasers got your relatives?"
Anybody else would probably have avoided mentioning the murder of my biological family, assuming it was too sensitive a subject to broach. But Dad was painfully blunt—especially with me. Also, it often seemed he could read my mind, so it was no surprise he somehow understood that he could broach the subject now without triggering a flashback or traumatic breakdown.
I had been returning to the trailer from my daily run when my big dumb German Shepherd started going nuts. She was not very vigilant or protective, for a dog, but she knew something was wrong that day. I finally realized it, too, when I saw my biological mother's body being carried into what looked, on first glance, like a hole in reality. I couldn't see what was carrying her at first, but after a moment I noticed the visual anomalies all around the trailer. Then I saw Abel's body folded at the waist, arms and legs dangling. He bobbed up and down as one of those patterns of distorted light carried him toward that hole in reality.
The Erasers, and their vehicles, were cloaked by an active camouflage similar to what "the Predator" wore in that Arnold Swarzenneger movie from a couple years ago.
Years ago? It was all decades in the future, now.
Anyway...the "hole in reality" was just an open cargo door in one of their camouflaged vehicles. After the hit was executed, the assassin team were disposing of the bodies. Erasing people from existence. They murdered my biological family, and my poor stupid dog, trying to kill me.
I puffed my cheeks and told Dad, "No, you're right."
He flashed me a sidelong grin and backhanded me playfully in the chest. "You've got the brain of an engineer. Can't help but try to figure stuff out."
He turned onto the street where my new home awaited. A middle-aged mailman walking on the tree-lined sidewalk with a canvas sack slung over one shoulder waved cheerfully at us as we passed. Across the street, two young mothers who had been pushing baby strollers in opposite directions on that sidewalk were having an animated conversation with each other. Both their smiling faces turned toward us and they waved, too, before resuming their discussion. Further down the street, a man, perhaps in his 20s or 30s, was playing fetch with a fuzzy little dog in an unfenced front yard, apparently having a great time.
Now I understood how Marty McFly must have felt in that scene from Back to the Future when he first sees his home town as it had been in the 1950s. In relative time, it had been months since my reality had been immersed in that St. Louis trailer park in 1988. But the radical contrast between that and this world that previous generations knew (and took for granted) still left me flabbergasted. I half-expected all the doors of those nice, clean, middle-class houses to slam open and an army of the undead emerge. The friendly, carefree people who waved to us would shapeshift into bloodthirsty monsters who would converge on us and drag us, screaming, from Dad's car.
Dad's expression turned solemn. "Remember our conversation, Sprout: the Erasers are looking for you. It's a vast continuum, and they're not sure where you could be hiding. You should be safe at these coordinates, so long as you don't do anything to draw unnecessary attention. What's your name?"
"Isaac," I replied. "Peter is my middle name, now."
"Okay," he said, nodding. "What's our last name?"
"Jaeger."
"Who am I?"
"My dad."
"Who is Angelina?"
"She's my mother."
This was a sore point with me. Dad lived different lives at different coordinates, and in each life I knew of, he had a different woman—or "spinning plate" as I had come to think of them. I considered this to be unfaithfulness to Mami by him. By extension, me accepting this arrangement with another woman as my mother made me feel like I was being disloyal, too. I didn't need any mother but Mami, and believed Dad shouldn't need anyone but her, either.
"Good," he said. "Make sure you always call her 'Mom,' and think of her that way. She's a nice lady, so give her a chance."
I nodded, not saying anything, lest it come out as a grumble.
"I'm really glad you and Hortensia think so highly of each other," he added. (Hortensia was Mami's name.) "And I'm sorry for how confusing this might be. But trust me: it's necessary. You're gonna live the best possible life this way. And I'll make sure you get to spend time with her on the regular."
I nodded again and he seemed satisfied.
"Stick to our cover story any time somebody asks you a personal question," he reminded me. "We're just normal people, with normal problems and normal aspirations. Copy?"
"That's a good copy," I replied, using the lingo I had learned from him.
Our house looked very similar to all the other houses in the neighborhood. He braked the Willys to a stop just past the mailbox, then backed it into the concrete driveway. He didn't park it in the two-car garage because that was currently occupied by the Auburn Speedster and a Packard sedan.
