Authors: Dr. Cuthbert Soup
This was a lot of information to process at such a ridiculously early hour. “So let me get this straight,” said Jason. “You guys are us in a couple of years?”
“That's right,” said the older Catherine.
Jason shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. In doing so, he spied the baseball lying on the floor. He picked it up and immediately took notice of the signature it bore. “Why is there a baseball autographed by me sitting on our kitchen floor?”
“Because,” said Jason, removing the pack of ice from his lip, “you and I are only the second person to have ever pitched a no-hitter in the World Series.”
“We are? Seriously?” said Jason, rolling the ball around in his right palm.
“Seriously,” said Jason.
“Awesome,” said Jason. “But that can't happen until we're old enough to play in the majors. So where'd you get the ball?”
“Got it from Simon's grandson.”
Jason looked at his little brother, now only four years his junior. “Simon is a grandfather?”
“He sure is,” boasted Gravy-Face Roy. “And a world famous, award-winning novelist.”
As if on cue, the younger Simon trudged out from his bedroom and into the kitchen, already chewing the massive
wad of bubble gum he kept on his bedpost each night while he slept. “Can we open presents now?” he asked, his eyes at a mere fraction of their full openness.
“It's not Christmas yet,” said Olivia.
“Well, if it's not Christmas, then why are we up so early?”
“It's Christmas for us,” said Catherine, giving her mother another mighty hug. “We got the best present of all.”
“Why is there two of everybody?” asked Simon, noticing the doppelgängers for the very first time. If the concept was difficult for Catherine and Jason to understand, imagine how absurd the whole thing sounded to Simon's six-year-old brain when his father tried to explain it to him. Once he had finished, Simon had only one question, and he directed it to his older self. “When you're eight,” he said, “do people still boss you around?”
“They sure do,” said Simon. “All the time.”
“Darn,” said Simon, chomping away on the giant wad of gum. “Nothing to look forward to.”
“I have a question too,” said Olivia. “Being that there are two of everyone but me, what do we do now?”
No one spoke, but they all seemed to agree that, yes, something had to be done.
If the Cheeseman house were a TV show, it would be rated number one, because it was easily the most watched house in town. In addition to the mysterious blue sports car in the alley and the long black car down the block, two others had recently shown up. The first was a dull gray car sitting on a side street and facing the Cheeseman residence. Inside the car were two dull men in dull gray suits with dull gray hats.
To their mothers the men were known by their birth names, but to each other and to the supersecret government organization for which they worked, where all employees are given initials and those initials are always spelled out, they were known as Aitch Dee and El Kyoo.
“I don't get it,” said El Kyoo, whose appetite for sandwiches the size of waffle irons had been responsible for his bottom-heavy, bowling-pin shape. Aitch Dee, on the other hand, was quite broad in the shoulders but very skinny in the legs, causing him to very much resemble a kite.
“You don't get what?” asked the kite-shaped secret agent.
“I don't get why we have to sit here all day and night
and watch this stupid house.” El Kyoo took another bite of his giant sandwich, made with six types of cheese, nine different kinds of meat, and no kinds of vegetables.
“I don't want to be here any more than you do,” said Aitch Dee. “I'd rather be home organizing my collection of rare and hard-to-find nickels. But do you hear me complaining?”
“Actually, I can't hear much of anything when I'm chewing,” said El Kyoo, taking another bite of his double-decker cholesterol sandwich.
While Aitch Dee and El Kyoo were watching the Cheeseman house and talking about nickels and chewing, another car was parked just a block away. This one was small and brown and of unknown make and model. Behind the wheel sat Pavel Dushenko, an international superspy operating on a very limited budget, due to his country's recent economic problems.
He held an old soup can tightly to his ear and listened with great concentration for any conversation originating from the Cheeseman house that might make its way along the string that had been tied to a second tin can, which had been secretly duct-taped to the vent from the kitchen fan. “I hear nothink, Leon,” he said in his very thick accent. “But don't worry, my leetle minkey friend. We will all the time very soon get LVR, for which will be very good, and also not bad.”
Leon was Pavel's partner in espionage, and he was, indeed, a very talented monkey (or minkey, if you will), with the ability to do impressions of just about any animal,
including a very convincing parrot imitating a myna bird mimicking a parakeet imitating a walrus with a Boston accent. Leon showed his excitement for the possibility of obtaining Ethan and Olivia's fabulous LVR by screaming and repeatedly slapping himself on the head in what appeared to be a spot-on impersonation of a monkey who has just been informed that his hair is on fire.
Were his hair on fire, finding water to put it out would not be difficult, because on the backseat of the car sat a ten-gallon aquarium, home to Leon's three beloved gold-fish, swimming placidly in and out of the columns of a miniature replica of the Acropolis.
Meanwhile, there was nothing placid about the mood inside the long black car, parked but a hundred feet away. Of all those on the hunt for the LVR, the Plexiwave gang was, by far, the most dangerous and vilest of them all. One of those nasty specimens was listening intently to his cell phone.
“My wife left me a message,” said Mr. 88, pulling the phone from his ear. “We're having a Christmas party tonight, and she wants me to pick up a Yule log on the way home.”
“So?” said Mr. 207. “What's the problem?”
“The problem is I know what a log is, but what the heck is a yule?”
“I think it's an animal of some kind,” said Mr. 29, back from sick leave but still with a runny nose and scratchy throat. Some evil villains love their jobs so much, they insist upon coming to work even when they're sick.
“Yes, I believe you're right,” said Mr. 207. “A yule is what you get when you cross a yak with a mule.”
“Oh. So then a Yule log is something you definitely wouldn't want to step in,” said Mr. 88.
“Exactly,” said Mr. 207.
“Quiet!” shouted Mr. 5, a vein the size of a Polish sausage bulging from his right temple. “A Yule log is a log, plain and simple. You put it in the fireplace and set it on fire. Get it?”
The others took a moment to consider this. “Wouldn't that be kind of smelly?” asked Mr. 207.
“It's a log made of wood! There is no animal known as a yule. Now can we just drop it? I can't hear myself think with all your pointless yammering and jabbering.”
It was instantly quiet in the car, without the slightest bit of yammering or jabbering, though there was a small amount of sniffling. The vein on Mr. 5's bony head shrank to the size of a gherkin pickle, and he could finally hear himself think. And what he was thinking was this: “I certainly hope Olivia Cheeseman enjoyed her coffee this morning, heh heh heh,” and, “I wonder if her husband has a nice suit to wear to the funeral, tee hee hee.”
What the internally giggling Mr. 5 did not know was that Olivia had consumed no coffee that morning. And, as far as husbands were concerned, she now had two of them, including one who had traveled from the future to foil Mr. 5's evil plan.
That particular husband was, at that very moment, pacing back and forth in the living room of the house, while
the other sat on the couch along with their mutual wife as the three of them joined forces to find a solution to the highly awkward state of affairs in which they now found themselves.
“I'm just not sure what to do,” said Ethan the elder to his beloved wife. “Now that the children and I have seen you again, I don't think we could bear to be without you.”
“Oh, that's so sweet,” said Olivia. Then, turning to the younger Ethan with a devious smile, she remarked, “You never say things like that to me anymore.”
Ethan could only stammer and stutter something about being too busy and too wrapped up in his work.
“But,” the other Ethan continued, “we can't stay. It just wouldn't work.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said Olivia. “With two husbands I'm sure I could get one of you to take out the garbage. Works for me.”
Both Ethans gave Olivia the same look. It was her natural beauty that had first attracted them to her, but it was her intelligence and wry sense of humor that had caused them to fall in love with her. And though both Ethans loved her with all their hearts, the older Ethan loved her more because, unlike his younger self, he had known life without her. For two years he had lived a hollow, Olivia-less existence, and it's always easier to fully appreciate something once you've been deprived of it.
It then seemed quite unfair that he would have to be the one to leave her behind.
“The whole thing is a rather difficult situation,” said the
younger of the two Ethans. “For instance, can we afford to put six kids through college?”
Olivia rolled her eyes and said, “My husband the pragmatist.”
“He does make a good point,” agreed the equally pragmatic older Ethan.
“Yes,” said Olivia. “But think of the money we'd save on clothing with all the hand-me-downs.”
As the adults continued to rack their genius brains, searching for a solution to the existing problem of too many Cheesemans in one place at the same time, the three younger Cheeseman children were showing the three older kids around the house they had once called home. Simon was eager for a visit to his old room.
“Wow, my dirt clod collection,” he said, admiring the clumps of dirt resembling celebrities that he had lined up on his dresser for display purposes. They were all there, just as he had left them: Abraham Lincoln, John Wayne, that guy with the big nose from that show he wasn't allowed to watch but sometimes did anyway. He picked up the dirt clod resembling Spider-Man. “I found this one behind the Dumpster in back of the school.”
“I know,” said Simon. “I was there.”
“Oh. Right.” Simon returned the clump of dried mud to its place on the dresser next to one that looked just like the Blob. He scanned the room and spotted, on the floor in the corner, what had been one of his favorite toys. “My train set!” he gasped.
“You wanna play with it?” asked the younger of the two
Simons, who'd always wished he'd had a brother closer to his age.
“Sure,” said Simon, dropping down to the carpet for a closer look. “But I get to be the engineer.”
“And I get to be the conductor,” said Gravy-Face Roy.
“Then what do I get to be?” asked Simon.
“You get to be the guy who loads the luggage,” came the answer. “And cleans the restroom at the station.”
Young Simon seemed disappointed, but when he agreed to the proposed terms it became official. For the first time in his eight years of life, Simon finally had someone he could boss around, even if that someone was himself. This suddenly made everything he had been through almost entirely worthwhile.
In Jason's room, Big and the older Jason were busy impressing the younger with their many tales of adventure. Jason sat on the floor, hanging on their every word as they relayed stories of witch hunters, pirates, haunted castles, and a near-death experience at the hands of a hungry T. rex.
“Wow. And I thought our class field trip to the hydroelectric dam was exciting,” said Jason the younger, who actually hadn't found the field trip exciting in the least.
“Yeah, that was pretty boring,” agreed Jason the elder. “But not nearly as lame as the one to the pencil factory. Remember that?”
It was then that the younger Jason suddenly realized he was in the presence not of an older brother, but of an older and wiser doubleâone who shared not only his exact DNA, but his entire history, and was privy to everything he'd
ever done or said and to every thought that had ever crossed his mind. He had to admit that he found the whole idea of it a bit disconcerting, to say the least.
“I'm glad you guys came from the future to save Mom's life,” he said. “But, to be honest, the whole thing is kind of weird.”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” agreed Jason, though to him it wasn't nearly as bad. There were two years of his life that were his and his alone, whereas every single moment of the younger Jason's existence was common knowledge shared between the two of them.
“Well,” said the younger Jason. “I think I'm gonna go ⦠do stuff now.”
“Oh. Okay,” said Jason. By the time the younger Jason had slinked out of the room, the older one could understand what the adults had been talking about. Having everyone together, coexisting in one place along the Time Arc, simply would not work. “We're going to have to leave here,” he said to Big. “Which means we're going to have to leave her. We have to leave Mom behind.”
Jason stared at the wall, a dull ache rising from his stomach to his chest. Big clasped his hands tightly between her own. “It will work out, somehow,” she said. “One way or another. It has to.”
Jason was not so sure, and neither was Catherine as she watched her younger self stand before the mirror in her bedroom, engaged in her morning ritual of lovingly brushing her long auburn hair four hundred times with a brush made of imported porcupine quills. She wondered
how the young girl would feel to know that a large chunk of that very same hair had been left back in the year 1668.