A Special Chemistry
Yaalc
“Why the fuck, do you keep looking at me like that?” asked Marc.
“Looking at you like what, twerp?” responded Trevor.
“I don’t know, like I’ve got an interesting zit or something. God, can’t you just get your homework done so I can do something fun?”
“What? Like World of Warcraft or something equally geeky?”
“Better than trying to teach some dumb ass jock how to read, I suppose. Shit, fifteen years old and you can’t even read.”
The smaller of the two boys knew he’d gone too far with that comment, judging by the look of fury that crossed the other’s face. But he was pissed. He had been trying to teach this Neanderthal how to read all because Trevor’s mom had asked his mom if she knew someone that would do it, which led to his being volunteered for the job.
Or as his mom liked to put it: “It will do you good. You could use the money and his mom is my best friend. Besides you need to break out of your shell.”
He’d tried to make his mom see reason. Telling her what an egotistical jerk Trevor was. How he never even bothered to try in school, all because he was good at sports. How it wasn’t his fault that Trevor had never bothered to learn anything. People like that disgusted him.
Marc was lost, thinking about how he’d gotten into this, when he realized he wasn’t in his chair anymore. He was in fact falling to the floor with a larger body looming over him. He desperately tried to get away, kicking and flailing his fists at his attacker. But after a few futile moments Marc ended up on his back with Trevor holding him down.
“Come on, Trevor, get off!”
“Say you’re sorry, twerp.”
“Alright shit, I’m sorry you’re a dumb ass, now get off!”
“You don’t know when to quit do you? Tell me you’re sorry right now or I’ll pound your ass!”
“You’d like that wouldn’t you, a big jock like you raping a defenseless boy like me?”
It took a moment for the words Marc had spoken to penetrate, but when they did it caused Trevor to look at Marc in an entirely different manner. He stared down at the smaller boy, but instead of seeing his dorky tutor he really looked at him as a person. His emerald green eyes magnified by his glasses, his dirty blond hair cut short and spiked, his lips a red that didn’t quite look natural. And the more he looked the more he felt something stirring deep inside of him. Almost without thinking, he leaned over and placed his lips on the stunned boy’s mouth.
The green eyes seemed to grow even bigger as Marc struggled with this new development, but then of their own accord, his lips responded. One kiss turned into two and shortly the boys were lost in a make out session. They had been locked in a passionate embrace for quite a while, when they heard a knock on the door.
“You boys okay in there?” Marc’s mom asked through the door. “It’s awful quiet.”
Trevor bounded up with a look of horror on his face and quickly threw his books in his bag.
“We’re fine Mom,” said Marc, opening the door. “Trevor was just getting ready to leave.
“How’s it going Trevor? Is Marc helping you at all?”
“I’m umm fine Mrs. Latham, and yeah he’s doing a lot for me. I gotta run. See ya”
That said, Trevor made a hasty retreat, let himself out and began walking the five blocks home. As Trevor walked down the street, his mind began to race. He could see his world crashing down around him. As soon as Marc blabbed about what had happened, and Trevor was sure that he would, things would change drastically. He imagined the taunts and jeers of his teammates, the hateful looks and words from his fellow students, and the new indifference from his teachers. If only his history teacher hadn’t been such a prick and threatened to fail him if he didn’t catch up. He’d never have had anything to do with Marc.
By the time Trevor got home he had worked himself into a bundle of raw, exposed nerves. Walking into the kitchen he found his mother cooking dinner.
“Hey hon, how was your day?” she asked
“It was okay I guess. How about you, how was yours?”
“Oh Lord, lets not get into that. We had a temporary nurse today, and when he got with the other gay nurse! Jeez those two fags couldn’t get anything done. All they did all day long was talk about where they got their hair and nails done. Where they liked to shop and who had the best sales. All day long those queers couldn’t shut up about it. It was a wonder their patients got any care at all! It was like being in queer central and I was drowning in fags!”
“Oh, that sucks.” Trevor managed to get out. “I, umm, need to get washed up for dinner. Be right back.”
Trevor took the stairs up to his room, each step seeming more difficult to climb than the last. The raw nerves had been battered again and the darkest thoughts of his young life invaded his head. Now he not only had the taunts and jeers of his peers to look forward to, he saw his mom kicking him out when she found out. Thoughts of a bleak existence living on the street, or flipping burgers for minimal pay, ran through his head. In a moment of sheer panic Trevor did what came naturally. He ran to the front door, threw it open and bolted into a sprint, hoping to escape his fears. He never saw the car coming. A shooting pain, then blackness was the last thing he remembered.
Twenty years later Trevor used his bottom lip on the joystick that operated his wheelchair to move himself closer to his mother’s grave. Tears ran down his face as he thought of the woman that would no longer be a part of his life. He thought of the selfless devotion she had bestowed upon him. She’d quit her job and gone on welfare to be there for him at every moment, bathing him, dressing him, changing his urine and colostomy bags, feeding him and all of the other myriad things a quadriplegic required to survive.
Once again dark thoughts entered his mind as he thought of what would happen to him, going into a nursing home. He wondered how often he would have clean clothes, food or a fresh colostomy bag. He imagined the worst as he pictured his future.
“Trevor?” a voice interrupted his thoughts.
Wheeling himself around, he found himself looking up at a man about his age, thin with glasses, green eyes and dark blond hair. He felt he should know the face but couldn’t place a name to it.
“It’s me. Marc”
Trevor’s face tightened and his mouth drew into a thin line.
“What the fuck do you want, twerp?”
Deep inside Trevor knew it was wrong to treat Marc this way. But when he’d woken up in the hospital twenty years earlier, realizing that he would never walk, throw a ball or pretty much do anything else ever again, including finishing the job he’d started that night, he’d needed somewhere to lay the blame and found it convenient to lay it at Marc’s feet. After all, if Marc hadn’t tempted him, he never would have ended up where he did.
“I just wanted to talk to you for a minute.” He looked at Trevor’s nurse. “Alone.”
“I’ll just wait for you over here, Trev” said the nurse as she moved off to a place where she could see him but allow them some privacy.
“Well, I can’t really get away from you so say what you want to say.”
“It’s a long complicated story, but I’ll make it short and leave out a lot of details that you don’t really need to understand anyway. You’re probably going to think I’m nuts but it’s a true story.
“I’m a doctor now; a trauma surgeon actually. Several years ago when I was in my last year of residency we had a trauma come in, an unconscious individual with a hard, distended abdomen. Knowing that usually means bleeding in the abdominal cavity, we rushed him to surgery. When I sliced into his abdomen, instead of finding blood, a vapor rose out. We were mostly protected by our masks, but some of the fumes leaked through anyhow. We all became somewhat disoriented and saw something rising from his body. I knew we had all seen it but it was never reported. Who would have believed us? I instantly ordered everyone out of the room and then sealed it. Without even thinking why I looked into the abdominal cavity and saw several balloons, one of which had ruptured. I quickly scraped some of the paste from that balloon into a vial and grabbed one of the full balloons. I snuck them out in a bag that I stuffed into my sock
“We ended up having a hazmat team and the police show up. The police, using the man’s wallet, determined that he worked for a local pharmaceutical. Within an hour of being notified, they had a lawyer there with a subpoena for the drugs that were found. A policeman and the lawyer attended the autopsy to make sure nothing was missing. No one ever knew that I had removed some before hand.
“It turned out that the man worked for that pharmaceutical company, in the R&D department. He was stealing secrets and selling them to other pharmaceuticals. He’d swallowed some drugs they were developing in several balloons, but one of the balloons broke. There was nothing we could have done for him. All of the drugs were unknowns and we had no way to treat him.
“I’d never really been interested in the chemistry side of medicine but I was fascinated with what I had seen. I took the drugs home to study. It took me a long time to get up to speed in my spare time but eventually I determined that the individual drugs were being developed to treat common ailments. It was the drugs being exposed to stomach acid and mixing together that had caused the vapor and our ‘hallucination’.
“After many years and much trial and error I determined that the mixture of those drugs, affected a previously unexplored part of the brain, and I discovered that we really do have souls. Basically our brains are connected to our souls, much like they are connected to our nervous system. The brain receives input from our senses and transmits those inputs to our souls, where our personal history is recorded using a chemical that was previously undiscovered as the recording medium.
“I did a lot of experimenting and eventually invented a drug that would allow me to access the part of my brain that controlled the input to my soul. I couldn’t let anyone know what I was doing, so that first time I took the drug I was scared to death. I hadn’t done any trial work at all. But somehow I got lucky and it worked. I was able to view my soul, not just as chemical but as the memories that were stored there. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever done.
“The second time I took the drug I wanted to see if I could manipulate those chemicals, so I chose a moment in my past when I had a rough night sleeping. I think I was around eleven then. I focused in on that night and when I found it I added a thought, a thought that I wrote down and somehow deciphered, giving me an inkling of what might be happening. I’d chosen a moment where I was old enough to hope for comprehension but young enough that I could still change things I wanted to change.
“I continued with the experiments, I wanted to see how making changes in my past would affect my future. I carefully chose things that wouldn’t affect my future so much that I never became a doctor and made my discovery. The first thing I changed was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. Do you remember the day I’d gone to the restroom at school, but I’d forgotten to zip up, and I was wearing boxers without a button fly. It didn’t take long for me to realize why everyone was laughing at me but by then it was too late. I’d thought that all the whispers and stares were just the normal shit I got every day and when I figured it out I was mortified! I never thought I would live that moment down.”
“I don’t remember that ever happening.”
“Of course you don’t. I changed it so I remembered to zip up. That life altering humiliation never occurred. How do I know it happened? Whenever I changed a memory I left a copy of the original behind. More as a thought than an event that occurred. That allowed me to further grasp what I was doing to myself.”
Trevor chose that moment to interrupt.
“Assuming this isn’t a fairytale,” he snarled, “why are you here telling me? Why have I never heard of this drug? Why aren’t you sitting in some mansion somewhere?”
“I thought about it, for a long time. I thought about the good people could do, the lives that could be saved. I also realized the type of world we live in. I felt that in the long run it would be used more for evil than good, and that was something I didn’t want on my conscience. Could you imagine if someone like Jeffery Dahmer had gotten a hold of it? He could go back and fix the mistakes that got him caught. How many more people would he have been able to kill? I thought of all the greedy rich people who would use it to increase their wealth at the expense of everyone else. I thought of the politicians who would use it to further their cause, or of people like Hitler who could possibly use it to destroy the world as we know it! What good would it do if a hundred million people went back to change that lottery ticket? The split would net everyone a whole dollar. And besides it was made from something I’d stolen”
“And again, why are you telling me this?”
“Because the drug has a serious limitation, you can only access your own memories. You can’t go beyond your birth or into your future. Therefore, you can only affect your life.
“One of the things I most wanted to change in my life was the day you hurt yourself. When I found I could change things in some ways I went back to that day to try to change it so you didn’t end up like this. I must have gone back a hundred times modifying one little detail at a time, but I could never change what happened to you.
“That’s why I’m here; I stopped making the drug, burned all my notes and destroyed any evidence of what I had been up to. I have only one pill left. I wanted to offer it to you, to give you a chance to go back and change that day.”
“Why? Why would you do that for me? I’ve done nothing to inspire this opportunity. I treated you like dirt before that day and I’ve shunned you ever since. So tell me why you would do that?”
“For years before that day I had admired you. All the time we were forced to spend together with our moms? When you treated me like shit? But after that afternoon when we kissed? I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You showed me a side of yourself that I hadn’t even thought could exist. I re-evaluated the things you’d done in the past, and concluded that maybe you’d only done them to hide what was really going on inside. Somehow that afternoon I fell in love with you, only to never be able to see where it could have gone, because of your accident. I would have done anything to be given the chance to see what could have been.
“Okay so how do I know this isn’t some cock and bull story you’re feeding me to exact a final revenge?”
“Does it matter? If I’m legit then you have a chance to change your past, if not then what harm do you really think it could do? You’re already a quadriplegic.”
Trevor mulled the possibilities over in his mind and decided that he really didn’t have anything to lose.
“Gimme the damn pill then,” he demanded.
Marc pulled a small pink pill out of his pocket and placed it in Trevor’s mouth. The nurse seeing what he was doing yelled and started running towards them.
Time seemed to stop for Trevor, then he felt weightless; a freedom he hadn’t known for twenty years. Time seemed to stand still as he felt himself floating in a sea of memories.
“Hey hon, how was your day?” she asked
“It was O.K. I guess. How about you, how was yours?”
“Oh Lord, lets not get into that. We had a temporary nurse today, and when he got with the other gay nurse! Jeez those two fags couldn’t get anything done. All they did all day long was talk about where they got their hair and nails done. Where they liked to shop and who had the best sales. All day long those queers couldn’t shut up about it. It was a wonder their patients got any care at all! It was like being in queer central and I was drowning in fags!”
Trevor felt his stomach lurch and started to get up to leave. Strangely, something tickled the back of his mind and before he’d consciously formed the words they were spilling out of his mouth.
“Do you really feel that way about fags Mom?”
A look of abject mortification crossed his mothers face.
“Oh God, honey no, absolutely not! I know so many wonderful people who happen to be gay. It was just those two today that absolutely drove me over the edge. I’d never really judge someone on who they were attracted to. It was just so frustrating to not be able to say anything to them about it. . Really there are good and bad people in all walks of life. Why even my best friend is a lesbian!”
Twenty years later two men stood beside an open grave, tightly holding each others hands. Marc was dressed in a black suit and Trevor was wearing his fireman’s dress uniform.
“She was a wonderful lady, your mom.”
“Yeah she was. You know I have a feeling that she would’ve been there for me no matter what had happened in my life. I love her so much!”
“Let’s go home.” Marc said “there will be people there to greet.”
The two men turned to leave. Trevor never noticed as Marc, with a satisfied grin, slipped a bottle of little pink pills back into his pocket. Hand in hand they walked away.
Copyright Notice - Copyright © May 2007 by Yaalc
The author copyrights this story and retains all rights. This work may not be duplicated in any form – physical, electronic, audio, or otherwise – without the author's expressed permission. All applicable copyright laws apply.
Disclaimer: All individuals depicted are fictional, and any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.