Expiration Date

Grandpop Henry was covered in blankets. A catheter tube ran down the side of the bed to a plastic container, but it was only partially obscured by a thin piece of blue linen. His piss was on display for the world to see.

He looked at me and I swear he had tears in his eyes.

“Your arm.”

His voice was croaky and weak. I looked down at my right arm in its sling.

“I’m fine. It’s nothing. And hey, you’re the one in the hospital, remember?”

“You got that going back, didn’t you?”

“That happened to you, too, huh?”

“I haven’t been able to move my left arm for two years. But never mind that. Tell me everything you did.

There isn’t much time.”

“What I did?”

“Yeah, I could hear you just fine last time you were here. You found the pills.”

“How about you start telling me everything you did, Grandpop? Because I’ve spent the past week trying to figure it all out.”

“There’s no time for that. I need to make sure you didn’t screw anything up.”

Oh, that was rich. Me screwing things up? I didn’t want to stand here and be lectured. I wanted to know what this was all about. All of my life, my family had been talking around me instead of to me. I was sick of it.

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

I looked him in the eyes.

“I’m not telling you a thing until you explain everything to me.”

“Feh.”

“I want you to say the words. You were trying to go back in time to kill Billy Derace, the man who killed your son. My father.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You’re denying it?”

“Yes, I’m denying it. Actually, I was going back in time to kill Billy Derace’s father.”

“After your father was killed there was no trial. Nobody could place Derace at the bar, so he stayed where he was—that loony bin up the road. Well, that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to look into his eyes, to know if he’d done it or not. Then I’d do what I had to. But I knew I’d never be able to set foot within a mile of that place if I told them who I really was.”

“So you got a job there.”

“Hey. Who’s telling this, you or me? So yeah, I got a job there. This was years later—1989. But before that I waited. Paid attention to the newspapers, just in case they were to spring him early. I read all the local papers cover to cover looking for any mention of him. I saw all the pieces about those tramps he murdered—but I had no idea it was him. Nobody did. Nobody does. You wrote that story a few years ago—”

“You read that?”

“Yeah, I read it, I read everything you wrote in that paper, even the things you got wrong, and you got plenty wrong. Now will you stop interrupting me? I don’t have that much time. Anyway, you wrote that story a few years ago and by then I knew, I knew what he’d been up to because I was living there and I found DeMeo’s notes and then I knew what he could do.”

“DeMeo was killed in 2002.”

“Yeah, by that shadowy son of a bitch. I’m not crying for him, though. DeMeo deserved what he got. He knew about the hooker murders, but didn’t say anything because he thought Billy was his big breakthrough. After all those years of pumping people with that poison, he finally finds somebody who can do this cockamamie walking out of your body stunt. Only problem is, it’s this nut-job kid who raided his drug stash when his whore mother wasn’t looking.”

“Erna Derace.”

“Erna Derace, yeah. DeMeo’s journal said—”

“Wait. We didn’t find any journal. We looked all through the desk and didn’t find any journal.”

“I know. ’Cause I burned it. Once I figured it out, I didn’t want nobody seeing this stuff. Nobody’s business but mine. Now. You’re my grandson, you’re the only flesh and blood thing on this earth that I care about, but if you don’t shut up and let me tell this story I swear to God I’m going to pop you in the kisser.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry, sorry, yeah, we’re all sorry. Anyway, it was around 1980 and this kid, Billy, had grown up to be a real piece of trash. He’s drinking at thirteen, doing the dope when he’s fourteen, stealing shit and mugging people when he’s seventeen. By that time, he also starts breaking into DeMeo’s office, hoping to score pills. He scored pills all right.”

“Wait—he started back then?”

“He started back then. He realized what he could do. I went back to those papers and read about all of these little break-ins up and down Frankford Avenue back in 1979. A real one-man crime wave. Nobody could figure it out. But I did. Only, it was too late to do anything about it.”

I thought about my first experiences with the pill, and yeah, even my mind went to larceny. I was a thirty-seven-year-old guy with a fairly decent moral compass. Billy Derace, though, was an abused kid with a mother who drank and whored herself out to the fat doctor upstairs and pretty much felt the deck stacked against him. Of course he would goof around on those pills. He must have felt like a superhero with new powers. Only he didn’t go back in time. He was able to astrally project into the present. He could do whatever he wanted.

One thing didn’t make sense though.

“So why did he kill Dad?”

Grandpop looked at me, annoyed.

“Because he was a nut, why else? Like I was saying, I started working at the hospital in 1993. They did a background check, but it wasn’t a very good one, because they didn’t know I had a son. I’d been divorced since 1959, so I guess they didn’t dig back too far. And your dad was using that stupid name, so no one put it together. Anyway, by that time DeMeo already had Derace over in this maximum security wing—”

“How did Derace end up there in the first place?”

“He overdosed in the summer of 1979. And surprise, surprise, the crime wave ended. His mom begged DeMeo to put him somewhere safe, not turn him over to a state-run hospital. I guessed it worked, because he had his own bed over at the loony bin.”

“So he was at the Adams Institute when my dad was killed.”

“Yeah. Only he wasn’t. I think he started going for walks outside his body full-time, since his own body was more or less out of the picture. Like me.”

I looked at my grandpop.

“Like you?”

“I haven’t been sleeping this whole time. I’ve been walking.”

“Walking where?”

“Just walking. Never mind that. You wanted to hear this whole thing, fine. I understand. And you know, it’s probably a good thing someone else knows, in case I’m not able to fix things. But for now, really, Mickey, I want you to shut up and let me tell this the way I want to tell it before I strangle you with my pee tube.

“Okay, Grandpop.”

“So I started working there and learned that this little bastard’s kept at the Papiro Center. Nobody was allowed in except DeMeo and his own cleaning staff, twenty-four/seven lockdown. The cleaning staff was allowed on the grounds, you know, to cut the grass and sweep up, but we were never allowed in the building. I spent years trying to get into that building. They had their own cleaning people. Bused in from somewhere else, I don’t know where. So it became a matter of stealing some keys. I figured I’d hang on to the job long enough to steal some keys and get myself into that building and grab a pillow and push it down over his face until he stopped breathing. Or maybe I’d bring a steak knife with me. Stab the bastard, just like he stabbed your father. Watch the hot blood splatter against his face as he looked into mine. Then I wouldn’t care what the cops did to me. They could throw me in a cell, do whatever the hell they wanted. But I never got in. Instead, I was reading the paper one day when I saw that DeMeo had been found, knifed in the back and in the head. I thought maybe that creepy little bastard had gotten loose, killed his own doctor, was ready to go on a rampage. But no. According to the patient logs, Billy was still in lockdown. He hadn’t moved. He’d been strapped to his bed. I couldn’t figure it out. It made no sense. When DeMeo bought it, I dug up his personnel file and found another address—the place on Frankford Avenue. I didn’t think I had much time, so I broke in, figuring I’d get a few hours, maybe a day before they clear out all of this stuff. I start looking through his papers, none of it makes a damn bit of sense. I stay there that one night, just to give me a little time to look around, and then I end up staying the next night. Nobody ever shows. So I end up staying there for good. The mushin running the store downstairs was paying his rent to DeMeo in cash, sticking it in his mailbox, so I took the money and paid the bills with it. I spent my time looking through his papers. And then I started reading about his pills. Crazy horseshit, I know, but there was a ton about them. How he thought they could give people out-of-body experiences. He never had much luck. They didn’t work on very many people. And half of those people didn’t even have real out-of-body experiences. They said they were back in some other time only they were invisible. So I found his stash of pills in the medicine cabinet and took one, just to see what the fuss was about. Only later did I put it all together. Of course DeMeo had no idea. His patients there started describing stuff from twenty, thirty, forty years in the past, and he thought they were making it all up. But I knew. I knew the very first time I took those things. Because I took one and I went into the past. I saw things I never thought I’d see again. The Starr Café, right there on the corner of Margaret and Frankford. It closed when I was a kid, but suddenly there I was looking in the front window. I couldn’t believe it. So I took more pills and started walking around more. I learned quick that I could only walk at night. You discovered the same thing yourself, I see. But the nights were long, and there was so much I wanted to see. I walked down to the river and saw the Delaware River Bridge, almost finished. They opened it the year I was born—1926. They call it the Ben Franklin Bridge now, but it was the Delaware River Bridge then, and it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen. I saw my father and my mother down on Second Street. You never met my father, because he died when I was just a kid. I hadn’t laid eyes on him for seventy some years. I was a ghost but I didn’t care. I was seeing everything I’d missed.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You went back to your birth year, too, didn’t you? I don’t know why that is. The pills only do that to very, very few people—I read DeMeo’s reports. But I guess that’s how our brains were built. We take these pills, we go back. And when I saw my father, and myself as a baby, I started thinking of your father. Thinking maybe it wasn’t too late. Thinking maybe I could do something to fix things. I couldn’t do a thing about Billy Derace. He wouldn’t be born for another twenty-four years. But I could find his father. I could find his father and do something about him.”

“You never found him, though.”

“Victor Derace didn’t exist back then. It’s like he was a ghost.”

“Billy’s mom told me he changed his name a lot. But he was born Victor D’Arrazzio.”

My grandpop stopped and looked at me. Really looked at me. His jaw opened a little, and then he moistened his lips and looked over at his right hand, which was clutching the blanket.

“D’Arrazzio.”

“Yeah.”

“Spell it.”

I did the best I could, but Erna hadn’t spelled it for me either.

Grandpop didn’t say anything for a while, and when he spoke, he was mostly muttering to himself.

“So it’s not too late.”

The whole time grandpop was speaking—and it was just like the old family holidays, Mickey sit down and shut up, Mickey go get your grandfather another warm beer—I took everything in. But with each new piece, I thought of my father. He’d taken the pills, too.

And the more I stared at Grandpop, and at his thin, mangled fingers from years of manual labor, taped up with IV tubes, I started to realize what else had happened.

The story didn’t begin with Billy Allan Derace attacking my father at random in December 1980. The story also began with my father taking those pills in 1972 and being thrown back into his own past. I remembered what my mom had told me, about what my dad had said not long after I was born.

Why he wouldn’t speak to my grandfather.

Why he hated him.

And quite possibly why he’d been so distant with me.

He didn’t know how to be with me.

All he knew was what his father had taught him.

I touched grandpop’s hand. It was cold and dry. He snapped out of his reverie and looked up at me.

“What?”

“Did my dad ever talk to you about those experiments when he was alive?”

“No. We didn’t talk much then. I didn’t know how to talk to him. He didn’t seem to want to talk to me either.”

“Did you ever wonder why?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You went back to 1926—the year you were born. I went back to 1972—the year I was born. So when my dad went back to 1949, what did he see?”

“How the hell would I know?”

“You would know because you were there. You were there in 1949, not long after my dad was born, and you were smacking Grandmom around with a belt.”

His eyes bulged—I caught him by surprise. Then they narrowed into hot angry slits.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, I do, and you’re going to listen to me now. Don’t you realize that dad took those pills, too? He probably went back and did the same things you and I did. He went home. But what did he see? Well, I guess he saw how you really were. Smacking Grandmom around.”

“You don’t understand a goddammed thing. You don’t have any kids.”

“Yeah, and with shining examples like you and my dad, why the hell would I? Raise them, hold them, cuddle them, just so I can turn around and start beating them on the ass with a leather belt? Beat them until the backs of their legs are black and blue, and thank God it’s still long pants weather so no one at school will see?”

My grandpop said nothing for a while, staring up at the ceiling.

Finally, after a while, he spoke again.

“Well, you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m going to go back and fix things.”

“Right. With those magic pills. But I don’t think you’re going to be able to fix things, because no matter how hard you push, life has a way of pushing back even harder.”

“I can fix things.”

“No, you actually can’t. The pills are gone. Someone stole them.”

“Yeah, I know. I stole them.”

“What? That was you? How?”

“I hired some kid I know to break into the place, which technically isn’t breaking in, since it’s my place.”

“No it’s not. It belongs to the government.”

“Yeah and the government owes me for what it did to my family. They couldn’t kill my boy in Vietnam, so they had to get him with a bunch of loony pills. Well, I’m going to use those pills against the sons of bitches. I’m going to set things right.”

My grandpop had them in his hand. He forced the pills into his mouth and chewed on them like hard candy.

I lunged for him, forgetting that I was down to three good fingers, and they weren’t enough. He was eighty-four yet still strong as an ox. A lifetime of manual labor will do that for you.

He smiled at me as he chewed, pale eyes boring into mine.

“Don’t worry. You’re not going to remember any of this.”

Even now, he couldn’t bear to call me by my name. Mickey. He’d never liked it. Never liked that my dad had named me after a faggy fat-lipped singer in a rock and roll band.

“It doesn’t work that way! You can’t change the past. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work!”

“You just didn’t try hard enough.”

“What do you mean, I didn’t try hard enough? What did you want me to do, go back in time and kill a twelve-year-old kid? Is that what I should have done? Is that what you’re trying to do? Grandpop, you can’t just do that! You can’t!”

But I was talking to his unconscious body. His eyes were already closed; his other self had already left his body behind.