“Now, you’ve got it, right? I want to be transported to 1962. For real, and as myself, knowing what I know. No changes. Me, Durward Bailey as I am in 2024…only give me different clothes.”
“Different clothes,” murmured the massive brown caterpillar.
Durward strode from his desk to his unmade bed and back, a matter of thirteen steps. “I know how these things work,” he declared, shaking a finger at the placid, mighty spirit. “Don’t grant the wish until I’m done spelling it out. I’ll nod twice, like….” He caught himself. “I’ll nod twice.”
“Nod twice. Yes, master.”
The old rhinestone brooch looked as if it had been in the secondhand shop for sixty years. Durward Bailey had been flipping it aside in the box of junk when the pin on the bock got lodged under his thumbnail. Something like this happened whenever he took time to shop among old stuff that fascinated him. Midcentury martini glasses snapped in his hands, cigarette cases broke at the hinge, and now one artifact decided to strike first.
Swearing he’d get tetanus from it, he had badgered the old lady who ran the place into giving it to him for free. Durward Bailey would have preferred cash, but she opened the cash register to show how empty it was. He couldn’t even get injured in a spot where it might be profitable.
For free, the brooch looked a little better but not much. He took it home and tried to polish it, thinking of eBay millions, and a small hairy caterpillar crawled out. Throwing it on the floor, he watched in awe as the caterpillar grew, its head bumping the ceiling before it inquired, in a gentle voice, what he needed. The ancient spirit had the power to grant him one wish.
This was more like it, and Durward didn’t have to think long about his wish. He had fantasized since grade school about going back to before he was born, starting a new life before his current hard luck began. Having considered in daydreams just where to place bets and make investments, he might die before the twenty-first century, but he would die rich, in a world where the laws and lawyers to bedevil the wealthy didn’t exist. No longer would he be Durward Bailey, a nobody who worked a nothing job and came home to watch nothing television until he fell asleep so he could do it all again tomorrow. Mr. Durward Bailey III (no reason not to keep his own name, since he wouldn’t have been born yet, but he could class it up a bit) would be a person of substance, a man to remember.
“Give me the right clothes for the period, and five hundred in cash…cash of the period, too. I want to be in the United States, with U.S. currency, got that? I want to look as if I belong there: no surprise tricks like some Twilight Zone episode, where I’m stuck with something from the wrong decade so I can’t win.”
“Nothing like a Twilight Zone episode. You will be transferred as you are now, Master, save for your clothes and cash.”
Durward shook both fists at the caterpillar. “And no time limits. Once I’m there I stay there. No yanking me back to this dump just as things are turning my way.”
“No yanking back.” The genie nodded. Durward thought it over, and nodded twice himself.
He blinked. In place of his unmade bed was a different unmade bed, and next to it was a small screen television with rabbit ear antenna, and an oblong radio. He turned. Where his computer had sat on his broken-down desk a dented typewriter waited. Looking up, he found a bare light bulb where the cheap ceiling fan had hung. This was it: the 1962 counterpart of his 2024 apartment. He took a long look so he could describe it to reporters in about ten years, telling about where he had started his rise to the top. It was exactly what he’d wished for.
He frowned. Well, no: not exactly. Something was not quite…he glared at the couch. It was light gray. The floor was light gray. The blankets on the bed were a darker gray. He raised his hands. There was no color to anything; it was all black and white. What was THIS all about?
“Submitted for your approval, a Mr. Durward Bailey, who made a wish to be transported to a world of the past, but not in a way LIKE a Twilight Zone episode.”
Durward, recognizing the voice, took a deep breath.
“A man of few achievements and fewer prospects, but with one unexpected chance to change his future, Durward Bailey chose to shift from his ordinary life to a place where he was sure his knowledge would make him extraordinary. And–knowing how such wishes work out–he specified that he was not to be sent to something LIKE a Twilight Zone episode.”
“No!” Durward screamed. “No no no! I know how these stories work out! Get me out of here!”
He rushed for the door of the apartment. It didn’t open. Hammering on the panels, weeping, he begged for the genie’s attention. Then Durward Bailey realized he was not pounding on wood but glass.
“Proof,” the calm relentless voice went on, “That knowing how things work out may not prevent them from doing so…in the….”
Durward Bailey gazed in horror through the great glass wall and saw thousands of people looking back from couches of light orange or pale beige. He dropped into a heap on the floor, his body heaving for just three seconds before the credits rolled.
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