S. Dyer - The Nostalginauts

“So, you wanna go to the prom?”

“Why?” I asked. “Like, I thought the Chess Club was going to I hang on Geek-web.”

It was going to be a worldwide hook-up of dateless losers. You can’t say we don’t know how to have a good time.

“I just think I ought to be there,” Gar said. “At the prom.” He shrugged. I shrugged.

We were on the steps of the old Carnegie-built library—its motto: One hundred years, nothing controversial yet —and were watching the church across the street. A wedding. That meant the possibility of time travelers. Or not. Entertaining either way.

“So why me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why not Net Girl?”

“She’s too popular.”

True. She’s only a junior and already has five electronic boyfriends. She also weighs three hundred pounds. But a hell of a website.

“Besides,” he said. “You clean up nice. Remember Halloween? You were hot on Halloween.”

There was action inside the church now, people opening the doors, spilling outside. We craned forward.

The happy couple emerged. Hands paused, loaded with rice…

Everyone looked around. The question on everyone’s lips: Would they be there? Would the happy couple, a quarter-century older, time travel back to reexperience this day of joy? Gar and I crossed our fingers sarcastically. Because if they didn’t show, it meant they were either dead, or divorced, or dirt poor. Talk about killing the festivities by your absence.

“Any bets?” I asked.

“Loser buys at T-Bell? I say they’ll come.”

Suddenly the air by a late-model Honda began to crackle and fluoresce. A middle-aged duo clicked into focus, promptly waving at the newlyweds. A collectively held breath exhaled in unison. The couple waved back, and everyone cheered. From across the street, we joined in. Let’s hear it for lasting marital bliss.

And then, just as suddenly, the old pair’s thirty seconds were up, they clicked out—and here came more travelers. The cheery offspring. Five of them, ranging in age from near-teen to must-have-been-pregnant-on-the-big-day. The crowd went wild.

“Hot damn,” I said. More life-affirming than an entire week of Nick at Nite.

“So, will you?”

“On Halloween I was a vampire in black velvet and red satin.”

“Works for me,” said Gar.

So we shook on it, and headed to T-Bell.

“You know how the lights go weird right before the dumdums show?”

When time travelers first started showing up they were called phantoms. When scientists figured out what they were, the media called them time tourists, or nostalginauts. We stuck with phantom, pronounced phan-dumb, and finally just dumdums.

I mean, what a phenomenally stupid invention. Time travel that only takes you twenty-five years into the past, lasts half a minute, and you’re insubstantial too. It makes a quest for rubber beverage containers look intelligent. Eyelash massagers. Trampoline deodorizers. Computer ventriloquists.

“But it is important,” Gar kept saying. “It means Time is quantized. So what if the first level is trivial… Maybe you can visit longer levels.”

“Then we’d have boring visitors from the far future, not just people with anniversaries and reunions.”

“Maybe guys from further out dress so they won’t scare us or give anything away. Or the future scientists could be viewing, oh, australopithecines or trilobites or the big asteroid crash. But it means We Understand Time. Unified Theory of Everything.”

I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling. Gar has a lot of emotion invested in time travel. He’s convinced he’s going to invent it. That’s okay with me. He’ll need something to keep him busy next fall when he’s at MIT and doesn’t have his geeky pals from the Chess Club to keep him real. (And no, we don’t play chess. We call it that to scare away stupid people. It works.)

A couple of classmates of the Neanderthal persuasion stopped by our table. “Hey dorks, drowning your sorrows ’cause you don’t have prom dates?”

“No,” I said, “We’re drowning our sorrows because it’s lonely being the only ones in town with active synaptic potentials.”

“Oooh, big words. I’m sooo scared!”

The bigger one tore open a couple of hot sauce packets and smeared them on my softaco. Ha ha.

I caught the moron’s eye, grinned, grabbed half a dozen more packets, added them on, and took a nice happy bite.

The Neanderthals turned pale and left.

“I can’t believe it,” Gar said. “They’re scared of spicy food!”

Good thing I hang on the Weird Cuisine SIG. And it’s why I have to leave town. I want to find out if Thai restaurants really do exist in nature. But I went back to the problem at hand.

“So why are you set on the senior prom, Gar? It’s not like you’ve ever been to a game or bought a yearbook or anything.”

“Last week, something weird happened. I was in my room thinking about Time, and how the lights before the dumdums come are kind of like when I put my metal-rimmed Pinky and the Brain mug in the microwave, and my jaw was hanging open really stupid… and I realized there was someone else in my room. A dumdum.”

“Wrong address?”

He shook his head. “He was looking at me, and smiling.” He shuddered. Our crowd wasn’t used to real smiles.

He was right. If true, it was most definitely weird.

“Maybe you were about to be murdered?”

“Yeah, of course, that’s it. And now I’m dead.”

Because that’s the only non-nostalgia use for time travel so far—checking out unsolved crimes. Deterrent value is zero. Face it. If a dumdum shows up while you’re busy ventilating a little old lady with an icepick, you don’t say, Whoa, I’m caught. You say Cool, I got away with it for twenty-five years! Which to your average criminal and your average teenager is like forever.

“Okay, let’s go with this as your grand moment of revelation. Kekule and the snake. Newton and the fig.”

I wasn’t going to let Gar’s ego get any bigger. So his IQ was bigger than the gross national product of Chechnya. He was still a dateless nerd. A laughingstock. A loser whose best friends were so socially inept they could really only talk to him via modem. And of course me, the rebel without a Santa Claus. The girl for whom the guidance counselors had made up a stamp that said bad attitude.

“You going to remember your old friends when you’ve got a Nobel Prize in every room?”

And then something happened. The air fluoresced and a dumdum appeared at the next table. And stared at us, staring back, for the longest thirty seconds of my life, before disappearing again.

“Wow,” I said. “Maybe I should save the hot sauce wrappers. They may be worth something someday.”

Mom was in the kitchen doing her June Cleaver thing. “Hey Mom!” I yelled, plopping down in front of the TV and going right to Home Shopping so I could make fun of the boomer collectibles. Eighty bucks for a model of a bicycle. “Hey Mom, can I go to the prom tomorrow night?”

I was sort of permanently grounded since I called the principal a neo-totalitarian babbitoid. I would have been expelled too, but someone finally explained it to him and it just wasn’t bad enough.

A fossilized survivor of the Partridge Family was shilling vinyl souvenirs. Makes you proud to be American.

‘The prom?”

I jumped. Mom was right behind me. She’d run out from the kitchen, hands still covered in flour, and was wide-eyed like she was going to cry.

“The prom,” I said. “It’s not like Lassie just came home.”