Page 53

"Oh, good god, Levi! What?" he asked as he gasped for breaths. "Did you just ask me if I'm from the future? Like a time traveler?"

My face burned and I knew I had to be fire engine red at that moment. I scrambled for what to say, how to turn this into a joke, or make a lame excuse about it being an idea for one of Sloane's paranormal romance books. I stood there, mouth agape, looking like a fish gasping for air.

Charlie managed to compose himself to say, "Levi, whatever happened to me obviously happened to both you and Angie… but it wasn't time travel."

I stared at him as if he'd lost his goddamn mind and said, "I know what happens over the next twelve years, because I've already lived through it and I know that you did, too. What the fuck would you that?"

"With the utmost respect, Levi, you don't know shit."

He must have seen my anger rising: brow furrowed, jaw clenched, hands balled into fists.

Charlie raised his hands in surrender as he said, "It's okay. I don't know shit, either. Too much has changed, and we have changed too much, for our futures to be the same. "

How is it I refrained from killing Angie, but I'm about to murder this guy?

"Let's take this slow and walk through it step by step," I said.

"Sure. But if we're doing this, let's at least do it over coffee," he said as he walked down the hall and gestured for me to follow him.

"You remember living another life, one in which you married Sloane?"

He took a heavy breath and wistfully said, "Yes."

"And you remember how you died in that life?"

He winced as if I'd struck him. Then he nodded.

"And you woke up here, in the past, but you retained all of those memories?"

"Twelve years' worth of memories," he said as we entered the breakroom.

"And those memories actually come true, just like you've lived them once already?"

"Almost always."

"And you don't call that time travel?"

"No."

"And why the fuck not?"

"Because," he said matter-of-factly, "my body died and I imagine Sloane cremated me, as were my final wishes. It was only my consciousness that woke up in this reality. My body did not 'travel through time' as you put it."

Frustrated, I shouted, "Then what the fuck do you call it, Charlie?"

He was silent as he moved about the breakroom, putting a pod in a fancy new capsule coffee machine, before he selected something with multiple shots of espresso. I sat at the tiny table and waited. Eventually, coffee in hand, he sat down across from me .

"What do I call it? Limbo? Hell? A parallel world? An alternate dimension? A mass hallucination? A communal dream vision bestowed upon us by an unknown and unknowable higher power? A glitch in the simulation," he shrugged. "Who knows? I don't, which means you sure as hell don't."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you are an idiot, and I am not."

He said we are alone, so there won't be any witnesses if I strangle him to death here in the breakroom.

I practiced my deep breathing before I said, "Well, I might be an idiot, but I figured you out."

Charlie nodded. "That is true. I was not planning on telling you, but it seems that miracles do happen and you managed to piece it together on your own."

I ignored the insult and asked, "How long have you known we were… the same?"

That wry smile returned to his face before he said, "As soon as I met you, that night you and Sloane brought Rufus here."

"Bullshit."

Charlie laughed and shrugged. "Well, think about it, Levi. My consciousness had been awake in this version of reality for over a year by that point. Nearly everything that I remembered from my first reality was the same, unless it was something that I directly impacted or changed. Ergo…?"

He spoke to me as if he were a teacher coaxing answers out of a student. To my annoyance, given our current circumstance, that wasn't too far off the mark .

I stood up to go make my own damned coffee and said, "When we showed up here with Rufus, that was a thing that you didn't recall from your previous life… because it never happened in your previous life."

"I don't think of it as my previous life, but other than that? Yes."

I tried to process the implications of what this could mean, the how and why of it all, but one thing leapt out at me. "You said you had twelve years' worth of memories and that you woke up in this life over a year ago?"

He nodded.

"It was twelve years for me as well," I said as I popped a coffee capsule in the machine. "I died almost a year after you did."

"Huh," he took a sip of his coffee. "Interesting. How'd you die?"

"Car crash, not important. Why twelve years? What does that mean?"

Charlie sat his mug down and turned to look at me. "Levi, how would I know that? How do you expect me to know what any of this means? Good god, man, we are in the same predicament and we have the same data to work with."

Neither of us spoke as my coffee brewed. When it finished, I sat across from him and we brooded together in silence. I was still contemplating what to ask next when he spoke.

"I wanted to make this reality a better one.

" He looked down into his coffee mug, his voice monotone, resigned, defeated.

"I thought if I could start up my nonprofit and buy out this clinic, I could forge a path to a better future for us: me, Sloane, Liam, and Violet.

I'd also be able to help the thousands of animals I had to put down in my first reality.

"I wanted to be there, ready and waiting, financially secure and emotionally available for Sloane when she needed me… for when you se t her life on fire and walked away." Charlie looked at me then, his face ashen and haunted. "But she doesn't need me in this reality, because she has you."

Damn right she does.

I sipped my coffee then cleared my throat. "You were back for a whole year before me. You had to know what was coming, what I was going to do… you could have warned her. You could have-"

"You cannot be this fucking stupid," he said with venom in his voice.

It may have been the first time, in either life, I'd heard Charlie angry.

"I could have what? Warned her? Warned her that her husband, whom she loved very much, was going to obliterate her entire life and destroy her for the rest of her days?

That you were going to knock her up, then leave her for a disposable, plastic, bimbo bitch while she gets sick, nearly dies, and has a miscarriage?

Is that what I should have told her, Levi? "

"If you had come to me-"

"Oh! Brilliant," he nearly shouted. "I would have been approaching a man whom I had never met in this reality, but who I knew to be a heartless, selfish, egotistical, hot-blooded, short-tempered narcissist, and I would have told him… what, exactly?"

"You could have warned me about Angi-"

"Stop." He closed his eyes and put a hand over his face. "Please, stop talking."

We sat, breathed, sipped coffee, and hated each other for a bit.

Eventually, in a calm monotone, Charlie said, "I need you to understand that I thought of everything you are likely to suggest. I had time to contemplate every variable.

I had a year and I was not idle. There was not a feasible way that I could warn anybody of anything without sounding like I was going completely mad. "

I sat there across from him, my stomach churning, as I focused on just breathing. I couldn’t decide if I should feel relieved that I wasn't alone in this fucked up rebirth, or terrified at the prospect that there could be even more of us out there.

“So," I asked with a shaky voice, "what happens now?”

He shook his head, a bitter smile pulling at the corner of his lips.

“I do not know, Levi. We do our best to ensure this reality is better than the first one?

We keep Liam out of trouble? We keep Violet safe?

We are there for Sloane, each of us in our own way?

" He asked this last part meekly before taking a sip of his coffee.

"That sounds like the most fucked up version of co-parenting in existence."

Charlie choked on his coffee and struggled to breathe as I laughed.

"Well," I said, "it is. You want to help me raise my kids and be a part of my wife's life, despite your decade of memories and emotions that you're saddled with? Memories that they don't share?"

He coughed a few more times, but managed to not drown on his coffee. "I will admit, the situation is unique."

"Sure as hell is," I agreed.

"Levi," he said, turning serious, "we cannot return to being prisoners in Plato's cave.”

I opened my mouth to say… something. But nothing came.

Prisoners in a cave? The fuck is he talking about?

“I am sorry,” he said, probably because he saw how confused I was.

"Our situation is similar to Plato’s cave.

Each of us, in our former realities, believed that the shadows on the cave's wall were all there was to life; money, our jobs, our routines, all the things we'd been told were important.

Those shadows were life, and that was all we believed there was to life .

"But now we, as in you and I, know better. We know more. We see the world differently now. Through violence, we were dragged from the safe, dark ignorance of the cave into the blinding light of the sun to see what none of the other prisoners could… that reality is vast and incomprehensible.

"And now, the hardest part? We cannot go back to share what we have seen.

We cannot explain the sun to the prisoners still in the cave.

They would think we went mad. They are still watching shadows and calling it reality.

And I understand why… I really do. Afterall, I was them.

But once you have seen the sun, you cannot pretend the shadows are enough anymore. "

Fuck me, I wish I had taken a philosophy class at some point in my life.

"Listen Charlie," I said, "all I care about is keeping my family safe. And between everything I remember about you from my previous life and what we've just hashed out over coffee?" I offered him my hand. "I think I can trust you to help me do that."

He took my hand, firmly shook it, then said, "To the most fucked up version of co-parenting in existence."