Expiration Date

My grandfather’s right hand twitched a little, one of his gnarled fingers tapping the side of an IV tube. His eyes were shut, but busy beneath their lids. Rolling fast.

Maybe he could hear me.

“Did you take them?”

No response.

“Did they send you back to 1972?”

No response.

“Is that why you never saw any of us the past few years? Have you been busy going to the—”

The door behind me suddenly opened and a nurse stormed in. She had frosted blond hair that was so severely spiked that if she  were to jump up toward the ceiling, she’d probably stick. The nurse ignored me and attended to the machines monitoring my grandfather. I was a visitor, but so what? She had things to do, a shift to finish.

So I shut up for a while. My questions weren’t exactly for the general public. Oh, don’t mind me. Just talking to my comatose grandfather about pill-popping and time travel. I rested my face in my hands, pretending to pray or something.

The nurse tapped my shoulder.

“Hey. You want his things?”

“Things?”

“You know. His clothes. They’re in a plastic bag in the closet over there.”

Grandpop was in a coma; I don’t think he’d mind if his clothes stayed unwashed for the time being. And I wasn’t about to blow three or four of my last dollars on dry cleaning.

“Not now. Thanks.”

She gave me a whatever look and left.

After a while, so did I. It’s hard asking tough questions when you know you’re not going to hear an answer. It’s all buildup and no release.

Or maybe Grandpop could hear every word I was saying and decided that his only grandson had lost his damn mind.

I didn’t know what Grandpop was doing in the past. But suddenly I knew what I wanted.

I wanted to see my dad one last time.

I had an overwhelming, primal need to experience my father in the flesh—not in a photograph, not a memory. I wanted to see my father in real life, through my adult eyes. The older I got, and the greater the time since he’d been killed, the more I distrusted my memories. I had no idea what he really looked like. I didn’t care if he couldn’t see me, or that we couldn’t talk. I just wanted to look at him.

An editor buddy of mine at the City Press—a news editor named Tommy Piccolo— once told me that he’d lost his dad when he was young, too. We were in the bar across the street, drinking many, many beers, and had reached that place where we were feeling mutually nostalgic and depressed. Tommy’s dad died when he was twelve years old, and now he was starting to doubt his own memories of the man.

“I mean, this was thirty-six years ago. I can’t tell what’s real in my mind, or what I’ve made up. I can’t even hear his voice in my head. I imagine him talking to me and I think he’s speaking in a voice I made up.”

I told Tommy I knew exactly how he felt. And then I think I ordered us shots of whiskey.

But now I had a second chance. Who receives a gift like this and pushes it away?

I’d even be satisfied if this were an elaborate dream brought on by hallucinogenic drugs in pill form. It was better than the alternative. Which was nothing.

So on the walk back from the hospital, I made my decision. I would pop some little white pills and go back to Darrah Street in 1972 and break into my own childhood home. Maybe I’d bust a window, or throw a rock at the door…or wait. I didn’t even have to break in. I could just knock something over in the backyard. That was the easiest way. There was an alley that led behind the row of houses on our block. I grew up playing in it, even though it was mostly overgrown with weeds, and the slabs of concrete had slowly chipped and shattered, letting the earth beneath reclaim its turf. I used to pretend it was a superhighway behind our house, and my toy cars could take me anywhere I wanted.

That’s what I would do. Walk up the alley, leap the three-foot-tall rusted metal fence, then find something in the backyard to knock over. I remember my parents kept a small charcoal grill back there when I was growing up. That would be easy to tip.

Then he’d come out, and then I would see him.

All I wanted to do was see him one last time.

If I was going to start wandering the past, I was going to need protection. I stuck tonights, so daylight wasn’t an issue. But streetlights and ordinary household lamps hurt. Someone swings a flashlight the wrong way, it could potentially decapitate me. So I ransacked my grandpop’s closet.

Every square inch of it was stuffed with button-down shirts and trousers, suit jackets, windbreakers, as well as plastic shopping bags full of ski caps, gloves and socks. It looked like a thrift store had gotten drunk and thrown up in here. Nails had been tapped into one wall, and over them hung cracked leather belts, suspenders and ties so loud they could blind the naked eye. And more boxes full of papers were piled up on the floor of the closet, as if he didn’t have enough things strewn around the apartment. Sometimes I thought I didn’t so much as move into Grandpop’s apartment as his storage facility.

I pulled on the hangers, trying to separate the clothes for a better look. They seemed to belong to no particular decade. They were old man clothes now; they would have been old man clothes thirty or sixty years ago.

At least my own wardrobe was consistent. At the City Press, T-shirt and jeans were the order of the day. If I had to seek an audience with the mayor or a member of City Council, sure, I’d put on a shirt with buttons. I owned exactly one pair of black dress pants from God knows when, one navy blazer, and one pair of non-sneaker shoes—black slip-on Sketchers.

After about twenty minutes of pushing and searching, I found a tan overcoat in Grandpop’s closet—the one men’s accessory that never seemed to go completely out of style. Like a beard, an overcoat could cover any number of sins.

And it would protect about 90 percent of my body from exposure to the light.

Grandpop also had a battered fedora hanging on a nail. I laughed when I first saw it. But light protection is light protection. And considering that one beam of light could potentially give me a lobotomy, it seemed like a smart thing to wear in the past.

It fit, too.

Dusk fell. It was time. I was buttoned up my shirt and fastened the belt on the overcoat. I tried to do that thing where you roll your hat down your arm, Gene Kelly style, but it just slipped off and floated to the ground.

I took three pills then laid down on the couch, overcoat wrapped around my body, gloves on my hand, fedora on my head—even though the apartment was sweltering. I tried to relax, let the pills do their job. Question was, would the coat, gloves and hat still be on my other body when I woke up?

My eyelids closed and then a second later I was back in 1972. And the hat, coat and gloves were still on. I checked the bathroom mirror, even lifting the hat from my head to make sure it wouldn’t vanish on me. But I was afraid to let go. Maybe if contact were broken it would fade away, like the ring and pinky finger of my left hand. I didn’t want to lose the hat just minutes after I’d found it.

In the past the office was empty. DeMeo had gone off to wherever he hung his cock at night. And the front door was locked.