The Anachronistic Code, Book One: Déjà Me.

By Dwayne R. James

It's 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen...AGAIN.
Josh has shifted back in time some fifty years and he doesn't know how, much less why. What’s more, he's noticing temporal anachronisms—minute changes that would only be obvious to somebody who had lived through the 80s before.
Is Josh alone? Is somebody trying to send out a coded message?
He's going to have to find all the changes to figure it out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dwayne R. James
• Release date: Oct 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781928015222

Dwayne R. James

Writer and watercolour artist Dwayne James lives outside of Lakefield, Ontario where he writes and paints as often as he can, that is when he's not spending time with his very forgiving family.Dwayne studied archaeology in University, and as a result learned how to write creatively. "The most important skill I learned in University," he says, "was the ability to pretentiously write about myself in the third person."With no formal art training, Dwayne has always preferred the self-guided, experimental approach. In fact, he taught himself how to illustrate archaeological artifacts while completing his Master's degree at Trent University. Said his thesis supervisor at the time: "There might not be much in the way of coherent theoretical content in Dwayne's thesis, but damn, it looks pretty!"After spending close to a decade as a technical communicator at IBM, Dwayne opted to look at their Jan 2009 decision to downsize him as an opportunity to become a stay-at-home Dad for his young twins, and pursue his painting and creative writing whenever they allow him to do so. It is a decision that continues to make him giggle with wild abandon to this very day.

Book preview

The

ANACHRONISTIC

CODE

DÉJÀ ME

by

DWAYNE R. JAMES

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 by Dwayne R. James

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A note from the author:

I’m unapologetic in the number of pop culture references that I make in this book. Please note that I give credit for each and every one and that it is not my intent to claim any of them as my own, or to incorporate aspects of their mythology into my story other than in a manner that is either referential or reverential.

Indeed, it is my goal to pay tribute to the positive impact that they’ve had on my life, and the lives of so many others.

The folks at Merriam-Webster define an ANACHRONISM as:

An error in chronology; especially : a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other.

Which is all well and good until you actually become an anachronism yourself.

Synopsis

It's 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen … AGAIN.

Josh has shifted back in time some fifty years and he doesn't know how, much less why. What’s more, he's noticing temporal anachronisms—minute changes that would only be obvious to somebody who had lived through the 80s before.

Is Josh alone? Is somebody trying to send out a coded message?

He's going to have to find all the changes to figure it out.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: Awakening

CHAPTER 2: Back to School

CHAPTER 3: Excerpt from Josh’s journal

CHAPTER 4: Reruns

CHAPTER 5: Meltdown

CHAPTER 6: Saturday

CHAPTER 7: Excerpt from Josh’s journal

CHAPTER 8: The jagoff and the Jag

About the Author

Also by Dwayne R. James

Chapter 1

Awakening

Swallowing awkwardly, I looked at the date on the newspaper again.

Wednesday, April 17, 1985.

Is this yesterday’s paper? I croaked, addressing somebody who, until just a few minutes ago, had been dead for more than twenty years.

My mother came up behind me and, as if to prove that she wasn’t an incorporeal ghost, leaned lightly against my lower arm as she looked down at the newsprint that I was holding, rather unsteadily, in my hands.

That’s the one, she said, before commenting on the subject of the paper’s main headline, the imminent launch of New Coke. "I can’t believe that it’s really going to happen. They’re actually going to change Coke."

I swallowed again as, somewhere off in the distance, I could hear the voice of somebody else who should also be dead. "What I can’t believe is that it’s front page news, my father muttered from the kitchen table, his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. It’s a geedee soda pop."

He continued to speak, but I wasn’t listening because I was staring at the date again.

1985.

My mind struggled to do the math, already overwhelmed with the absurdity—the ludicrousness—of everything that had happened to me since I had been awakened earlier by an oldies song on the radio that was, at least according to the Disc Jockey, being played for the first time.

It had been November of 2035 just last night, and I had been sixty-seven-years-old. That’s what … fifty years?

So, that would make me seventeen… again.

By the time I figured out that the words my father were currently speaking were, in fact, directed towards me, it was too late to do anything other than look over at him as nonchalantly as possible and play dumb.

I’m sorry, what?

Dad swore under his breath as he repeated himself. I said you’d better start getting ready if you want to catch the bus.

The bus… I parroted, distantly.

Yes, my father replied patiently. "The bus. To school. It’s where you’re going today… Because it’s a school day. He was speaking slowly now, as you would to a dim child, making it clear that, in 1985, my family’s penchant for sarcasm was alive and well. And if you’re going to wash that filthy mop that you call hair, then you’ll need time to shower."

"Shower… For School…"

Both of my parents were staring at me as if concerned that I was on drugs—admittedly a common concern for parents in the 80s as much as it was one for me in the 2010s when I had checked (or would check) Matheson’s pupils for excess dilation whenever he was acting unusually weird, which was often.

Teenagers in any decade I guess.

I still hadn’t truly accepted that what was happening to me was real, but if there was the slightest possibility that the two people in front of me were actually my long-dead parents, then there was no way in hell I’d do anything that might distress or worry them (even if I was technically older than them). This meant that my course of action was clear: I had to try and play along until I could figure out how I got here and—perhaps more importantly—why.

So, rather than arguing, I simply said, Gotcha, stuffed what remained of my breakfast into my mouth, slipped away from the table and willed my seventeen-year-old body up the stairs.

And get your lazy-ass of a brother out of bed too wouldya? my father called after me. I’m not driving him to school again when there’s a perfectly good bus… Mercifully, I didn’t hear the rest of his rant, because I’d already entered the bathroom and closed the door behind me.

For a moment, I contemplated the door knob. With my hand still gripping it—as if touching something physical in the new reality that I now found myself in would somehow ground me within it—I took a deep breath and finally articulated the only possibility left as to what was happening to me, no matter how ridiculous it might sound.

I’ve travelled back in time, I whispered, not wanting to entertain the thought very loudly, lest more volume make something so insane sound somehow more credible. It was funny how, despite a lifetime diet of science fiction movies, books, and TV shows with that exact theme, I was still resistant to the concrete reality of the idea.

I’ve travelled back in time, I repeated, slightly louder this time and with more confidence, letting go of the door knob so that I could turn and face the mirror. At this point, any desire to repeat the phrase flew out of my mind at what I saw in the reflection. It was me, well … kind of. It was the me that I remembered. The me that I saw in the few remaining pictures that I still had of my youth. A teenaged version of my form, with a single chin, a ton of hair, a face covered in tiny swollen red marks, and an overall physique with an enviable body fat percentage.

Seriously. When had I ever been this skinny?

For the longest time, I just stared at myself in the bathroom mirror of my childhood home, as if seeing myself like this made the entire fantastic experience that much more convincing. Admittedly, I had actually been getting swept away by the fantasy earlier when I’d been eating breakfast in the kitchen of the house that I had grown up in, with two people I still missed dearly, I completely forgot to be skeptical about any of it, and just accepted it as real for no other reason than I wanted it to be that way.

But now, well, this familiar-looking, acne riddled stranger smirking back at me from my own reflection, reminded me that I had some tough choices to make.

In the first place, just what the hell am I supposed to do? Not just about the shower, but for the rest of the day. At school.

Well, what were my options, really?

Was there anything wrong with me just throwing caution to the wind and actually going to school? I mean, this whole time-displacement thing could end at any moment, so couldn’t I just enjoy it while it lasted?

Can’t I just play along?

Chuckling to myself, I realized that, if this experience actually did continue for any length of time, I wouldn’t really have a choice but to do just that, and the main reason as to why was literally staring me right in face.

The reflection I was gawking at even now was the perfect reminder that, to the rest of the world, I was a seventeen-year-old boy. I really wanted to say that it was actually the reflection of a young man, but the sixty-seven-year-old soul inside me knew better. I was a boy. A boy who couldn’t easily buck the system. I had limitations—even more limitations that had been imposed on me in the Pucks. If I tried to step away from any of the standard conventions that limited a seventeen-year old’s freedom, like school for instance, then the consequences would be just as real as everything else I was experiencing at the moment.

I’m a boy.

A boy with no real resources to speak of that were solely his. I would have a bank account but, if memory served, it would barely be enough money to get me to Toronto. Sure, I could steal a credit card. Maybe borrow a vehicle. Try and make it on my own. But then what? How long could I get by? Where would I go? Yeah, maybe I could use my knowledge of the future to my advantage, but I could do that from here just as easily. Probably even more easily.

And then there was the impact on others that I had been thinking of just earlier, especially in relation to my mother and father. If that really was them downstairs, and I really had travelled in time, then I simply could not do anything that might hurt them or cause them any level of stress, and running away from home punched hard on all of those buttons.

My internal soliloquy was interrupted abruptly by a knock on the door and Dad’s gruff voice asking me to hurry up. What are you doin’ in there anyways? There are others who use that washroom occasionally too y’know!

I answered him while pretending that my mouth was full of toothpaste. Just brushen my teef! I said loudly, even as I scrambled to find my toothbrush. I remembered enough to look for it at the holder to the right of the sink, but there were four brushes hanging there beside the plastic Tupperware cup that we collectively used to rinse our mouths. Mom and Dad’s brushes were pretty obvious, leaving only two and, since that made it a fifty/fifty chance either way, I grabbed the one closest to me and then set about locating the toothpaste.

As I brushed my teeth, I continued my internal contemplation.

Can I tell somebody that I’m a time-traveler?

Well, in the first place, who would believe me? Unless I could find a way to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but what would I even say?

I began to think about just how such a conversation would go with my parents, and I started to laugh to myself as I came to see its inherent role reversal. Like many of my friends, I’d grown up in a generation when our elders went on at great length about just how arduous had been their pasts compared to our, generally rather cushy, present. They were forever complaining about such things as how far they had to walk to school, or how they had to make do with nothing during the hard times of either the depression or the World Wars.

And here I was in the unique position of genuinely being able to make the claim to one of my elders that my past had been just as grim and challenging as theirs had been, perhaps even more so, even though, strictly speaking, it hadn’t even officially happened yet.

You had to laugh. What else could you do?

When I was done with my teeth, I rinsed what I hoped had been my toothbrush, stripped out of my night-clothes, and stepped into the shower. It took a moment to figure out how to operate the faucet and direct the stream to the showerhead, but once the water hit me, I was inundated with another sense that convinced me even more deeply that this could not possibly be some kind of illusion, or dream, or advanced holodeck simulation. It was the smell of the water, the same earthy smell I remembered from my childhood. It was water with a taste, texture, and smell that was unique to Northern Ontario and it made me teary eyed as the scent filled my nostrils. How could that level of detail be replicated? Had I ever had a dream so vivid that I could smell something this strongly?

As I was shampooing my head (while mentally agreeing with my father that this was way too much hair) and trying to remember exactly how to use conditioner, I began to contemplate some popular movies and stories concerning time-travel, since that was where most of my knowledge on the subject seemed to originate.

Will time flow normally from today forward?

Could I find myself jumping around in time like the main character in The Time Traveler’s Wife, or like Captain Picard in the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation? Alternatively, what if I kept repeating the same day over and over again like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day? Both of these questions were pretty easy to dismiss from further contemplation though, since I wouldn’t notice either of those effects until they actually started happening to me.

Could this time-travel trip end at any minute, returning my mind to my proper period?

If memory served, in the movie Somewhere in Time, that’s pretty much what happened to Christopher Reeve’s character when he saw an anachronistic artifact—something that didn’t belong in the past there with him—that broke his hypnotic link to that era. I hadn’t seen any such anachronisms yet, but I made a mental note to watch out for them. Still, like the previous question, the answer to this was something I couldn’t possibly find until it, too, actually happened.