EXCUSE ME WHILE I DISAPPEAR
By Bruce Pollock
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It wasn’t enough that the man seated across the table from me looked like Dracula’s father making a withdrawal at the blood bank. But here it was the steamy middle of August and he wore a wool jacket and a yellow bow tie. His thinning hair was slicked back like he was posing for the cover of Undertaker’s Monthly. When we first met he stood so close to me I could smell the mothballs on his suit and the meatballs on his breath. I clammed up and barely nodded a greeting. Older men in general creep me out, especially figures of so-called authority. My coach on the track team, for instance, the time I caught him leaving our bathroom dressed only in my mother’s big white towel, souvenir of her lost weekend at a hotel in Atlantic City. I mean, what was there to say?
Adding to the creepiness of the day, I’d come up on the bus to the tiny campus of Shoal College on the Eastern tip of Long Island because they’d given me a full scholarship for their exclusive and expensive three-day program on “How to Ace the SATs.” But when the old geezer handed me a sheet of paper with my “program description” on it what I read had nothing to do with acing the SATS, or anything close.
“Founded on the historical precepts of behavioral psychology and based on cutting edge time travel techniques this new and exciting course affords the student the opportunity to relive and rewrite up to three days from his or her past and with each successful trip evolve into a more fully realized human being. Highly classified. DO NOT DISCUSS WITH ANYONE.”
I stared at my rumpled advisor and looked him straight in the eye, trying my best to smile politely, always a challenge in my case. “Are you serious?” I said.
“This course may not be what you expected, son, but it definitely works, if that’s what you’re worried about,” the man said. “Trust me, it’s been in the developmental stages for quite some time.”
I hadn’t trusted a man since my father disappeared ten years before. And I especially didn’t trust anyone who called me son. “What do you mean developmental stages?” I said as I rose to my feet. “Are you saying this has never been tried on an actual human being?”
The old gent came out from behind his desk. He put his hand on my shoulder. For a second I felt warm and trusting and secure. Or maybe I’d just been hypnotized. “Isn’t there a day or two out of your life you’d like to change, and in so doing, change everything?” he said.
I’d always been a firm believer in miracles, past lives, magical thinking, signs, omens, good luck charms, and winning the lottery. I was a devoted fan of time-travel movies since the age of ten. Yet all I could hear inside my head was my mother’s voice, repeating one of her favorite comebacks to my more optimistic plans. “If it’s too good to be true, then it probably isn’t” came to mind. Along with “be careful what you wish for.”
“I can’t even…” I mumbled.
“Any other questions before we proceed?” said the man, whose name tag identified him as Clarence Bowly.
Every nerve in my body was urging me to bolt. If I could just make it through the crowded student center to the big double doors, I figured I could summon up my once superior sprinting speed and vanish into the dense shrubbery that ringed the campus. But my legs felt like mashed potatoes. It was my first meet on the track team all over again, when I came in dead last after taking a commanding early lead. The coach got in my face right after it about my lack of guts, will, desire, and whatever else it took to compete. Of course I didn’t have what it took to compete. Competition was something taught to other guys by their fathers, even their divorced fathers. They’d come by every weekend to take them down to the pool hall or the race track or the ball game, or up to their office. How could I compete, anyway, with my mother at home clinging to my leg like a sick, sad puppy?
Quitting the team a week later the same day she broke up with the goon was so far the best move of my high school career.
Since before I was ten I had known that going off to college, preferably hundreds of miles from Long Island, would probably be the only way I’d ever get out of my house, out of her needy clutches. On the other hand, with my grade point average hovering just above sea level, and my first pass at the SATS underwater, clearly that dream was on life support.
“I just need to ace the SATs next time I take them,” I tried to remind Mr. Bowly.
“Why put a band aid on a concussion?” he said as his hand pressed deeper into my shoulder blade.
That was kind of insulting. But I didn’t want to yell at the guy. He might have a heart attack on the spot. “I have another question,” I managed to say instead. Bowly was all ears. All large pink hairy ears. “Why me?”
He smiled as he asked me if I remembered a particular series of tests I’d been given in kindergarten. “Not the regular IQ test. This was part of a secret limited initiative we devised to find the most gifted four and five-year-olds in the New York City area. It was funded only for one particular year. Out of the 670 children who took the test, guess whose composite score came out on top?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
Bowly nodded gravely. “Exactly. By the time you reached high school, all the potential you showed at age five had withered away to nothing.”
At seventeen I was already sick of that word potential, as it was used by a succession of school psychologists, guidance counselors, social workers, teachers, the coach of the track team, and my mother. Usually followed by the word wasted. “How would you know that?” I said.
“To justify the experiment, we had to design and maintain a tracking process to keep tabs on certain selected students to see how they progressed through life. While it was too much of a challenge for us to keep a video journal on 600 plus children, following the leader in the clubhouse and a dozen or so runners up proved doable.”
I took a deep breath and nearly fell over. This was getting weirder by the minute. Had someone been spying on me and Abby, I wondered, during those terrible years after the divorce, in all those dismal walkups in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, before we landed face up on Long Island?
“Ah, but it was such a sad thing, seeing how much you deteriorated after your father left.” Bowly said. “While all the others in the study went on to accelerated programs and honors courses, you just kept falling. And then after your father’s misfortune last year, you really plummeted. That’s when we knew we had to step in.”
Misfortune? How did he find out about Sid Meyer’s “misfortune”? He’d been vacationing in his new house near Mexico City with his second wife and her teenage son, when thieves broke in, shortly after midnight a summer ago, thinking the family was away for the weekend. (Only the wife and her son had left in the morning for Acapulco.) Hearing the commotion, Sid invaded the living room, armed with a golf club. The thieves had guns. One well-aimed bullet ended his life in a flash. The thieves got away clean, with a couple of antique lamps.
“I don’t believe it,” I had said after scanning the letter Abby showed me from her lawyer.
“Denial is always the first response,” Abby said with her trademark warmth.
No way Sid Meyer could be dead. He was a survivor, like me. “I deny that!”
“Rage is next.” She took down another shot of whatever it was she was drinking that day.
I stomped off to my room, holding the letter. Somehow, until that moment, I’d convinced myself my father would come back to get me, to rescue me from my life with Abby, one step ahead of the landlord, one step behind her latest boyfriend.
Pretending I’d shrugged off this blow, I went through the rest of junior year at South Bay High in a blur of Netflix and computer Scrabble. If my computer Scrabble average could have replaced my grade point average, I’d have been a shoo-in for Yale.
“Hello South Bay Community,” Mom hilariously observed after seeing my latest report card.
“Listen,” I said evenly, “if I can’t get into a regular college, then I’d rather ship out with the Norwegian Cruise Lines as a singing busboy.”
“Sounds like fun,” said Abby. “Take me with you.”
“Mom, you’re missing the point.”
“I know. I know. Everybody wants to leave me,” she said, breaking into tears.
I hated when she resorted to crying, although I should have already been used to it. “I was just kidding,” I said to her, which caused her to stop in mid-sob.
As creepy as it was to think that someone else was tuned in to my situation the whole time, making plans to fix things (by sending me back into the past) maybe it was also a little bit heartwarming.
No, it was mainly just creepy.
“Shall we go?” Bowly asked, but it wasn’t a question. He subtly moved me forward with his hand on my shoulder and I obeyed like I was hypnotized by the scent of his moldy suit.
The spell started wearing off right after he left me at the door to a small auditorium which he locked on the way out. Now I was alone in an otherwise empty room, facing a tiny video monitor, where a young instructor in an oversize black suit started explaining the program.
”The first rule of time travel is,” he said, “You break it, you bought it.”