Later that night, after leaving Beth’s house and returning home to supper, I found my thoughts fixated on Beth’s health problem—her fate, I guess—and my own problems with what I should do to cope with my own situation. Needless to say, I wasn’t very talkative during supper and I think everyone was wondering and speculating as to what, exactly, was eating at me this evening.

My parents were probably worried about my mental state; whether I was suffering from some form of mental illness or whether or not I was just going through a more intense and catastrophic form of adolescent angst.

My brother and sister were a different story. They were unaware of the premonition I had had concerning dad’s eyes—they were trying to relate my current behavior with the sibling that I used to be, someone who was quiet, shy, withdrawn, and afraid to rock the boat, with the current me who seemed determined to become something of an athlete where before he has hated all sports and physical endeavor; now sassing his parents and seemingly antagonistic to following the rules of the world while simultaneously slaving to achieve honor student status, while at the same time acting to get himself suspended from school for getting into and starting several fights.

Hell, I didn’t blame them for being confused. I was confused. I was just playing things by ear; dealing with problems and crisis with no overall plan in mind at all. Sure, the first couple of decisions were made in reaction to my…um…supposed heart attack and death—although, as far as I knew, I could very well be laying comatose somewhere in some kind of an ongoing dream state. But—if this was reality—worries about the consequences of what I was doing seemed to darken the outlook of the future which was laid out before me.

Was the Future written in stone? Maybe. Although it seemed to me that the changes I’d made in my life, while really sort of small in the grand scheme of things, had had some significant results. They had actually changed the Future; in fact, they were still altering it—maybe putting me into a slightly different trajectory, so to speak, but causing things to really change, anyway. A different path, mostly still the same—but different.

Maybe it was the same for everybody else, but I retained the memories of my previously projected future and was able to compare the changes which happened when I alter my behavior and did something different than what I did before. One big problem which had come up, though, was that in changing the timeline, I was only sort of altering things but the big stuff still happened. The big fight happened earlier than it had in my “previous” life. Ditto with the accident my dad narrowly avoided. I had thought that my warning might side-step the accident and might even keep it from happening, but no—the accident jumped forward to happen on the same day that I really broke from my past, swore at the principal and gotten myself suspended. Coincidence? Deep in the back of my mind I didn’t think so. They almost felt like one had caused the other—or both—to “fast forward.”

We finished dinner and I headed upstairs to do my school work. I did the homework quickly. It was almost like only half of my mind was concerned with working through and solving all those niggling math and English problems. The question that kept me preoccupied was one with which I had grapple with most of my life: Why am I Here? And: What am I supposed to be doing about it? That was the big question, wasn’t it? If I really tried to think about it, I couldn’t get my mind around the enormity of that question. I was still trying to reduce the situation into something that could be explained away as inconsequential. You know, small potatoes; not mindboggling, world-shattering or world-changing enormity.

I chewed my lower lip. Could I change the world—with my inner knowledge of what was coming in the future? Should I? Or was even thinking along those lines setting myself up to become some kind of monster, should I make some catastrophically bad choices or decisions; the kind which might cause some global catastrophe?

There was a tap at my door and I turned in my chair to face the door. “Yes?” I asked.

“It’s me,” my dad’s voice sounded from outside my door. “Can I come in so we can have a little talk?”

“Sure,” I replied. “I’m pretty much done with my homework.”

The door opened and my dad came in. He closed the door behind him and gestured toward my bed. “Do you mind if I sit down? This talk might take a while.”

“Sure,” I said, waving my hand toward the bed. “Have a seat. What did you want to talk about?

“What’s happening tomorrow,” he replied. He paused and then said, “We’ve made an appointment for you to see a doctor.” He hesitated and then added, “A specialist.”

I studied him for a moment, wondering, What sort of specialist? Instead, I said, “Okay. Since you came up here to tell me about it now, I guess that means that the appointment is going to happen during school. Right?”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything else. He looked like he wanted to, though, but wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Well, I’ve never been afraid to rush right in, so I said, “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

He nodded his head. “Your mother and I will be taking you to the appointment,” he said quietly. “We’ll be leaving early in the morning—the place where the specialist works is about a two-hour drive from here.”

“Okay,” I said quietly, nodding my head.

He frowned at me. “You don’t seem surprised.”

I shook my head from side to side. “No, not really. I would think that what’s going on with me is a little beyond the scope of a small-town G-P.”

Dad pursed his lips and then nodded grudgingly, saying, “Yes. Beyond the scope of even our local hospital.”

“So, I figure that this guy that we’re going to see, specializes in the human brain but more advanced than your run-of-the-mill neurologist. Perhaps, specializing in unusual diseases of the brain, possibly affecting cognition, perception, impairment and emotional stability.”

His eyes widened. I had scared him. “How do you even know this stuff?”

I looked down at the floor. “I’m not sure, dad. It just comes to me.” I looked back up and we looked at each other. “I really think seeing this doctor is a good idea. I think that I’m scared, too.”

He nodded his head and got to his feet. He looked tired and fretful. His eyes were troubled. “Well, hang in there, sport,” he said quietly. “We’ll get this thing sorted out.”

Everyone got up early the next morning. Breakfast got a little quiet after my sister, Carol, wanted to know what the doctors were going to do to me later in the day. The itinerary did not go over well, especially when my sister discovered that—after taking all the tests—it would still be a week to ten days before we would be notified of the results.

The drive to the hospital was boring. I tried to doze or look out the window at the passing cars and scenery, but didn’t have much luck with that. My mind kept worrying at all the troubling aspects of my situation. The hospital was a little more fast-paced. We checked in; were directed to the floor and room where the specialist seemed to be waiting for us. We had a short interview, with him questioning my mom and dad when I couldn’t articulate the answers that he wanted to his questions.

Then he handed me off to one of his physician assistants, who took me to a room where they collected a bunch of samples of my blood. From there we went to an office type of room where the assistant gave me a series of verbal cognition tests. Those started out pretty easy, with stupid questions like, ‘What is the name of the current President of the United States?’ And, ‘What city is this hospital in?’ After that, the questions became more involved, testing my short-term memory, math skills (requiring that I do the math problems in my head, without the use of pencil and paper), reading retention, and vocabulary. They also had me draw abstract shapes, including a three-quarter perspective drawing of a cubed box. That one was probably to determine if there was impairment to the right side of my brain, which normally handles spatial tasks and drawing three dimensional things, and language. Abstract concepts, like numbers, letters, alphabets, and grammar, are usually handle in the left frontal lobe of the brain.

The cognition tests took about four hours. We had a break for lunch. When we came back, the specialist met us and ushered us all into his office. There, he went over the results of the cognition tests.

He grinned at me. “You’re a very smart boy.”

“I get by,” I replied. Then I caught his gaze with my own. “But I’m not a genius, by any stretch of the imagination.”

The specialist blinked and the smile dimmed by a little bit. “Maybe,” he conceded, “but your vocabulary and reading skills tested out at near college age levels.”

My mom piped up on that one. “Charles has always been a reader. When he was growing up, he would rather hide in his room and read books instead of playing outside with his friends.”

Dad leaned forward. “What about the other tests—the non-verbal ones? What are those tests going to tell us?

The doctor made a steeple with his hands and contemplated us over the tops of his fingers as he spoke. “Well, we are conducting a full battery of tests. A full blood workup. That will show us whether Charles’ body chemistry is within the normal ranges for a boy his age. Hormone levels are also being tested, as well as oxygen and other gas levels. After I finish talking with you, Charles will be taken down to imaging for a head and chest MRI. That will show us that layout and physical state of his brain—so was can rule out any tumors of abnormalities there, and also his neck and chest, which will show any abnormalities in his lymph nodes, lungs or heart.” He put his hands down flat on the desk. “Then you can go home.”

The talk concluded and I was taken down to the imaging department, to be examined using a new type of scanner which was called an MRI, which stood for ‘Magnetic Resonance Imaging.’ Magnetic Resonance Imaging had been developed in the late nineteen-seventies. It was now supplanting the older x-ray scanners and cat-scan devices which used high doses of radiation to form negative images of the body. MRIs used less radiation—magnetic radiation, generated by using huge, shaped, superconducting rare-earth magnets—which produced highly detailed images of the brain, major organs, and soft tissue where the old x-ray technology showed only clear images of bones and metal. Soft tissues and organs like the heart and brain, appeared in x-ray images as faint fuzzy shapes, devoid of any sharp detail.

The MRI machine which scanned me, however, was huge, clunky, and pretty primitive piece of equipment, compared to what I knew I would have experienced forty years in my future—just before my heart attack had been somehow, seemingly, sent back here to my past.
As we left the hospital and headed for home, dad said, “Well, sport? Are you feeling better now that we’ve got some tests under our belts?”
“I guess so,” I said. I wasn’t feeling better at all.

“That MRI thing is state of the art,” dad continued. “They installed it about a year ago. They created a whole new department to utilize it. The doctor you saw today is the head of the department. You should be very impressed. He thinks your case is very interesting. He thinks that his MRI machine might prove to be ground-breaking important in understanding what’s been happening to you.”

I pursed my lips but didn’t say what I was thinking. If the level of technology from my future wouldn’t give a clue to how I ended up back here, how would the first generation of that technology do any better at answering that question?

End of Part 2a.