Expiration Date

everything in. Convince myself that I was actually sitting here in the past.

Everything felt real. I could smell the burning dust in the air, baked by the steam radiator in the corner. I could hear the rumble of the El outside. The squeal of the brakes. The thump of the doors opening, then closing. I could feel the fibers of the cushion beneath me, the smooth polished wood of the sofa’s frame. I could blink and breathe. I was able to run my tongue around inside my mouth.

But this couldn’t really be my physical body, could it? Meghan said she’d watched my body in the present— mumbling, convulsing and otherwise seeming to have a perfectly good time by itself.

So what part of me was sitting here right now? My soul? Spirit? Life force? Ghost? Whatever it was, this other me was able to walk downstairs and open doors and pick up newspapers. In fact, except for being invisible to most people and that pesky “dissolved by light” thing, this other me acted just like my physical body.

I thought that maybe I should stand up, test my limitations. Find something this body could do that my real body couldn’t.

But it was too late; time was up. I felt the familiar dizziness wash over me, and then one violent head nod later…

I was back.

I spent the weekend experimenting—nights only. I quickly learned that whatever time of day I popped a pill, that would be the time of day I’d wake up back in the past. Early Saturday morning I took a quarter of a pill, all excited to continue my experimenting, but then almost baked myself alive in the bright, glare-filled office—despite the cardboard taped over the windows. I crawled under DeMeo’s desk and curled myself up into a quivering little ball until the pill wore off.

So by day, I crashed. The pills left me exhausted and headachy, with my body temperature going up and down at random. It all felt vaguely like the flu. I listened to my father’s albums to distract me from the pain.

The only part of my body that didn’t ache were the two numb fingers on my left hand. I found some medical tape in the medicine cabinet and used them to make a crude splint. I can’t tell you how many times I accidently bent them backwards on the cherrywood desk or the couch because I forgot they were there.

From time to time my cell rang, and I would reach up and turn its face toward me and see that is was Mom calling again. Didn’t she get the hint by now that I pretty much never picked up the phone, that I always let her calls go to voice mail? She was unstoppable, though, leaving messages about visiting Grandpop, my job hunt, or coming to dinner—three things I had no intention of pursuing anytime in the near future.

My mom didn’t realize that pushing me resulted in an equal and opposite reaction. Or maybe she did realize, and hoped that at some point I’d snap and the physics would reverse, like the North and South Poles after a massive demagnetization.

So I ignored her.

Meghan called twice, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen to her messages. There was still a good chance I was caught on a downward spiral of insanity, and I wanted to avoid sucking her down with me. This, after all, was my pill-popping lost weekend. Just me, the pills, some peanut butter, sixes of Golden Anniversary beer and a bunch of LPs that used to belong to a dead hippie musician. You don’t bring people you care about along for a ride like that.

Besides, what did I think—that we had a future together? I was a philanthropic gesture. A novelty. Sooner or later Meghan moved on to something else. I’d watched it happen. No, I had to go this alone.

So by day I ate peanut butter and apples. If it was late enough in the afternoon, I had a few cold Golden Anniversaries. They actually weren’t bad if you drank them fast enough.

And by night I jumped around the early 1970s.

The more I practiced, the better my aim. The human mind is capable of all kinds of amazing tricks. Like telling yourself the night before that you want to wake up at a certain time in the morning. More often than not, you’ll wake up at that time—even beating the alarm clock you set as a backup.

So whenever I popped a pill, or the sliver of a pill, I started thinking hard about the date I wanted.

February 24.

February 28.

March 10.

March 30.

And so on.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t go back beyond the day I was born—February 22, 1972. This seemed to be the default line, and it was disappointing. The journalist in me had fantasies about going back to November 22, 1963, staking out the grassy knoll in Dallas and putting that nearly fifty-year-old story to bed. Dear Oliver Stone, my e-mail would begin…

But nothing doing. If I concentrated on February 21, 1972—or any day preceding it—I ended up back in February 22, 1972, by default.

I also couldn’t go back to a time I’d already visited. Maybe this was a built-in protection feature to prevent me from ripping open the fabric of reality, or something.

It worked.

Nor could I venture much beyond 1972. Saturday night I decided I wanted to see the Bicentennial, and my dad playing with his band near Penn’s Landing. This was one of my earliest memories: being down near the riverfront; seeing the tall ships; the red, white and blue streamers; and my father, Anthony Wade, strumming his guitar outside of a restaurant—just one of dozens of musicians hired by the city that day. I’d gotten lost at one point, and wandered off to a restaurant boat nearby along with my aunt, who was only nine months older. Some cop had found us, luckily, and all was good. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t. If we’d stayed lost. It was probably this combination of fear and excitement that imprinted the day forever in my mind.

So I popped four pills and thought hard about the night of July 4, 1976. I concentrated on the date, repeated it to myself over and over and over. I imagined fireworks. Red, white and blue streamers everywhere. Penn’s Landing. Liberty bells. The restaurant ship—the Moshulu. The bustle of the crowd. The sound of my father’s band playing. Every possible detail I could squeeze out of my own head. Again I repeated the date out loud. I went all method—I became the date.

The moment I woke up in the office, however, I didn’t feel right. I was dizzy and easily distracted. Oooh, look at the pretty cars. The speeding El…oooh! A pigeon! Somehow I made it down the stairs and out the front door to Frankford Avenue, which was alive and full of noise and kids screaming. Just make it to the El, I told myself. But the farthest I got was two steps on the sidewalk before I got dizzy, did a head nod and woke up back at home.

The pills wanted me to stick to a particular time frame.

The pills also wanted me to stay in the dark. I realized that losing my fingers wasn’t a fluke incident. Direct light of any kind—be it sun, a lamp or even a flashlight—did my time-traveling body serious harm. When I walked down Frankford Avenue and strayed too close to a neon sign, I felt it. I moved away, I felt better. If I lingered beneath a streetlamp, I would feel dizzy, and my ghostly eyes would water. It didn’t take long to put it together that light equals harm. And in big enough doses, it meant the permanent kind of harm. It was best to stay in the shadows completely.

Again I wondered about this ghostlike “body” I used in the past. Was everyone’s soul or spirit or ghost or whatever this sensitive to light? Is this the way we evolved flesh-and-blood bodies—to protect ourselves?

It’s questions like these that keep you up at night, making you giddy and terrified at the same time.