Chapter 2
Houston, Texas
5:18 AM CDT
It was an almost debilitating sense of déjà vu. He had seen this before. He had been here, in this place, before. He had lived this part of his life before. But not just this moment, or only the next few minutes. No, this is no ordinary déjà vu. He had lived the next two years before. He knew precisely and exactly what was going to happen, not just in a minute, or in a month, but for the foreseeable future. No, not just the foreseeable future; for a future beyond any teenage boy’s wildest projection. Two entire years. There it was, in his mind, just like a memory. No, not just like a memory, but literally a memory. And now he was being reminded of this memory as he was reliving these moments since he startled awake in the night. But this time, it was different, because he didn’t startle awake before; he didn’t remember that. He remembered what is to come in just an hour: getting up, getting ready for school, having breakfast, going to school, the ordinary things he did every day. He had a general memory of an ordinary school day, and a distinct awareness that he was living an ordinary school day, or would be in just a little while. One of hundreds he lived. And as time progressed, the memory was becoming more crisp, more detailed. He didn’t remember startling awake on this day, but he did remember waking up and going about his normal day.
Was it a memory? Could this be just some kind of insane, intense dream? Is it even possible to have a dream that lasts two years? Joseph suddenly remembered a movie he saw, where people could insert themselves into others’ dreams and it had some kind of time effect. What was that? Five minutes or real time was an hour in a dream? If that was true, then two years would mean nearly sixty hours of sleeping. That can’t be. But that was a movie. Maybe you can dream two years worth in just six or seven hours since he went to bed, he thought.
And then he remembered the end. If that was a dream, then it was a nightmare. He had been on a diving trip with his brothers. They were diving off the coast of some tiny island in Puerto Rico. He remembered a deep sinkhole, but it was not round. This one was elongated, like a sort of crack, or crease. In fact, he recalled, it was called El Pliegue, which means “the crease”. The dive boat had sounded the alert for them to return, and he had surfaced. Joseph distinctly remembered inflating his BCD, breaking the surface, pulling his regulator and swimming towards the boat. Then the next thing he remembered was like suddenly he was loaded with a weight belt and he was dragged under even though his BCD should have held him up top. He ditched his tanks and vest but he still could not swim to the surface. He couldn’t overcome the pull as he was pulled into the sinkhole. He remembered that he was beginning to drown, just like it was yesterday. Just like it was an hour ago. And then before he breathed in the water, he awoke here in his bed. In his old house. In a time and place he recognized but that didn’t make any sense.
What he remembered, what he recognized to be happening to him right at that moment, all of that was impossible.
He had to be dead. Or he was still dreaming. Or he was going crazy.
Whatever it was, his alarm was going of now and in just a few minutes he would be going to school. He knew this not only because that’s what he always did, but also because he remembered this very moment. Impossible or not, it was happening. Time to get up.
In his head, Joseph heard his brother Mark saying “You gonna get that?”, directing Joseph to turn off the alarm because it was closer to his bed than it was to Mark’s. Oh yeah, he thought, I share a room with Mark. Going backwards was not going to be cool, not at all.
Joseph turned off the alarm before Mark could make the request, and just the moment he did, his memory of what was to come began to get just a little more unclear. He must be going crazy. Instead, Joseph said, “Mark, you getting up today?”
Mark rose on his elbows and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Did the alarm go off?”
Joseph was ordinarily the late sleeper. Mark typically had to drag him out of bed. The alarm usually sounded for over a minute before Joseph was finally coaxed into waking up enough to turn it off, and then he would pull his pillow tightly over his head just before Mark would aggressively yank the blanket off of him like one of those old-time magicians whipping a tablecloth smoothly from beneath a formal dining setting. That would be a normal day. In fact, that would have been this day, the way Joseph remembered it. But today, none of that happened. Today, Joseph was already up. He knew what Mark was going to do, so he changed it. It must be a dream, he thought.
“Yeah. I had a weird dream. Woke up a while ago.”
“Well, you should have called dibs on the bathroom. Snooze you lose,” Mark teased as he left for the shower.