July 15, 1985
There
was a great blending of colors, as if I was moving fast. No, that's
wrong. I wasn't moving at all, it was the world that was moving.
There was no noise, and that was the most unsettling part of the
experience. That and the nausea, something J.C. had failed to
mention. In a matter of seconds, it stopped. During the whole
experience our feet stayed planted on the ground, we hadn't moved but
now the building opposite us was a faded green instead of brown. The
temperature was about ten degrees hotter, too.
We
were in the same filthy alley; and if anything it was dirtier. The
Dumpster we were near when we left was gone, replaced by at least ten
garbage cans, half of them belching trash. It didn't look much
different than 2013, but the surroundings were off. There were
differences you wouldn't have noticed unless you were looking for
them, like the hundreds of aluminum pull tabs ripped from soda and
beer cans that were embedded in the alley's asphalt.
Once we walked out
of the alley, though, you could tell we'd gone somewhere else. The
neighborhood had changed, and the first thing I noticed was the
electric and phone lines overhead – Con-Ed must not have buried
them yet. It was still Brooklyn, and most of the buildings were still
there, but some things were missing, like cell phone stores. Traffic
lights were strung across intersections on wires instead of topping
planted poles. There was a video store, it was a Mom and Pop instead
of any major chain; and they didn't have DVDs, only a large selection
of VHS and Beta. There was a TCBY Yogurt and an A & W, but there
was no Applebees or a Best Buy. As we walked down the street, I found
myself staring at the number of people with huge boom boxes, all
playing very loud and very public. A few folks, men and women, were
wearing shorts that were tight and short. I shouldn't have been
surprised that no one was talking or texting on a smartphone, or that
no one was plugged into an iPod, but I was. It's funny what we take
for granted. I noticed some people with pagers on their belts and
there were pay phones. Pay phones!
I
stopped to inspect one, a blue kiosk box mounted to the side of a
building, the Yellow Pages attached to a cable and dangling below. I
didn't notice that J.C. and Felicia continued walking as I picked up
the receiver and held it to my ear. Pay phones weren't that strange
to me – I wasn't that young. But they were things that disappeared
so slowly that I didn't notice they had become obsolete. With the
dial tone in my ear, I knew I had to make a call. I punched in the
number to my mother's house, trying to remember if it was the same in
1985. A three-note tone blared in my ear.
“You
must first deposit twenty-five cents to connect your call,” an
adroit female voice told me. Before I could dig into my pocket for a
quarter, Felicia harshly grabbed me by the arm.
“Would
you come on,” she hissed. I smiled an apology and hung up the
receiver.
As
promised, J.C. bought us a slice of pizza in a little joint around
the corner from L'Armour. The slices were huge and cost a buck, a
soda was thirty-five cents. There was a juke box in the place that
was playing vinyl records. I made sure to carefully look over the
juke box, silently amused each time a record was lifted from its slot
and placed on a turntable. The pizza place was filled with young
people who dressed in torn Levi jeans and homemade Ramones T-shirts.
J.C. didn't think our clothes would stand out – his old man
trousers and long coat didn't – but Felicia and I looked like
foreigners, her low-rise jeans and my cargo pants, stylish for the
21st Century, looked out of place with the faded denim and
torn T-shirts of the punks around us. They looked dingier, too. I was
staring at a guy with gnarled teeth and bad acne thinking that he
would have had both fixed in 2009. His shirt had a hand-drawn cartoon
that was labeled “Zippy the Pinhead.”
No
one seemed to give us a second glance, though, and it wasn't long
before Felicia started quizzing J.C. on time travel. She asked about
the device, getting the same responses he had given me earlier, but
she asked questions I hadn't even thought about.
“So,”
she asked in a hushed tone, “how are you able to sell your
antiques? If you go into the past and get things, they wouldn't age
would they? You'd have a hard time selling them, people would think
they're forgeries.”
J.C.
chuckled at the question and took a sip of coffee.
“Objects
brought forward in time don't seem to age, but I don't know if they
actually do. I haven't tried carbon dating them,” he said. “I
suspect they do age, mostly because the stuff I've brought forward
wears out pretty quick.” I thought of his collection of baseball
cards. They looked brand new, and even smelled of cheap bubble gum.
J.C. caught me furrowing my brow in puzzlement.
“Think
of this way,” he said, leaning in close, “it would be the same if
I locked an item – a card let's say – in a vault that was
temperature controlled, dark so the light couldn't do any damage and
opened it years later. It's still old, it just looks new.”
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