There’s not much to say about the accident, except that the city doesn’t want me saying anything at all.
All I have are half impressions. Concrete falling in slow motion, the feeling that I was already too late before I even knew I was in danger. My truck after—side smashed in like it had been hit with a wrecking ball. Parts, wires, lights scattered across the asphalt in a pattern that felt almost intentional. Who’s to say what memories are real and which are pulled from movies or TV to fill the gap. Memory’s a tricky thing.
And then there’s the clause. I’m not actually allowed to talk about the accident, anything that could be considered bad publicity for the city. It’s part of the terms of my settlement drawn up by my lawyer and the institutions or organizations you might consider responsible for what happened.
I lay at University of Kentucky hospital trussed up for six weeks or more with tubes in my mouth and who knows what hooked up to me—this thing to speed me up and another to slow things down. A coma they didn’t know I’d pull out of. A space of complete oblivion through which nothing passed, except the sounds of local TV stations that a young nurse kept running for me day and night—KET Kentucky Television and UK college ballgames. The Wildcats. I was out all during the Sweet Sixteen but up in time for the Final Four. Bleed Blue and Bluegrass ran through my unconscious mind like a prayer I didn’t remember saying.
I sat in that bed for weeks, able to think but not talk. My roommate Curt was the only one to visit me. I was pretty moved by it. I wasn’t even sure he liked me; I’d answered his ad on Craigslist for a 2-bedroom off Southland Drive back in the summer. He worked remote and was in his room a lot. He also worked a few nights a week at Speedway. We were pretty close for two people who didn’t ask anything of each other. We played a lot of chess.
He had a master’s in chemistry and physics from UK. He shaved his head and had a bunch of piercings and wore a Carhartt jacket inside because the thermostat stuck. He’d left his PhD program last year.
“It’s a fucking dead zone,” he said between pulls from a filthy bong. “And I’m not working for the Department of Defense again. No money is worth that. You should’ve seen what they were having us try on those guys in Arlington. I’d have never done it, but that was my only offer after graduation and my dad had just lost his job. I don’t know if people in this state know they’re allowed to vote for anyone but McConnell. He cut all state workers’ retirement benefits last term. I’m fine selling vapes and scratchers; frees me up to do my research and real work. Working for someone else is slave mentality, anyway.”
He was right about that. But what are you going to do—not work?
Curt kept about 30 composition notebooks at any given time, and they were all full of equations and writing about time, about what he called determination. And of course his chemical compounds.
“Are you ever gonna let me read them, Curt?” I asked when he wheeled me inside the Southland apartment.
“You couldn’t understand them before, so you definitely can’t now that you’re a retard. Let’s go in. It’s time for Jeopardy.”
“Let’s watch KET. I’m sick of Jeopardy.”
“No. So, you really don’t remember anything from before the accident?”
I didn’t. I remembered the basic outline of my life but no specifics. No first days of school, no birthdays, no first times. Just the shape of things, like a house seen through fog.
2004 DARRYL
It’s spring in Kentucky and March Madness is all that runs on anyone’s mind. When UK and UofL play, this is not basketball, it’s a holy war. The air turns electric with radio static and talk-show prophecy. You can smell popcorn and lighter fluid clear out Versailles Road. The Wildcats are winning again—Pitino’s hounds running the floor, Mercer flying, Walker grinning, the crowd moving like a single body. HERE COME YOUR KENTUCKY WILDCATS. National champs the year before, back-to-back Final Four threats. Folks called it resurrection.
I ran camera two for KET, Kentucky Educational Television, the state’s polite little PBS outfit out on Newton Pike. We shot Pitino’s press conferences, the governor’s debates, and the occasional hemp rally. I was there rain or shine, dutiful as altar staff, watching Rupp’s lights flare over a state of true believers. Cars honk through the night; anything not nailed down turns into a bonfire—win or lose.
Lexington burned holy in that glow. The city’s old brick washed in candlelight, every window a small congregation. When the Cats pressed full-court, the noise reverberated clear down Broadway. Some nights, I swear you could feel the horses at Keeneland reacting to the crowd; even they knew the score.
Pitino, we called him preacher, gambler, exorcist. Didn’t matter. Rupp lit him like scripture and 23,000 voices said amen.
The street glowed like an open furnace. She froze in the doorway, backlit by her own report running on the TV. Behind me, bar windows flashed the victory speeches—governor promising unity, a senator grinning under confetti.
“These boys remind us who we are.”
The entire world was before me.
But sometimes, when I focused on the screen too long, the broadcast would stutter. Frames duplicated. The crowd noise would lag behind the players’ movements by a fraction, like the camera was picking up sound from a different night. I’d blink and it would be normal again.
“I’m sick of the news, let’s watch KET.”
“No. Let me show you some of what I’m working on. Want to take a little trip?”
I wasn’t sure I was up for a trip. Curt was always making his own designer drugs in the UK basement lab he still had access to.
“You’ll like this—it’s really different, cerebral. I kind of made it with you in mind.”
“I’m touched.”
“So are you getting a huge payout?”
“Yeah, I am.” I was. I was getting something like 8 million from the city. I had a meeting with my lawyer John Tackett in the morning about it.
“Man, I wish the city would brain me. What do they want, just for you not to say anything about what happened?”
“Pretty much.”
“What are you gonna do with the money?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t into clothes, food, travel, or cars. I didn’t feel like going back to work. I didn’t feel like doing anything. I’d been passing my days at the hospital between Curt’s visits with the most routine activities possible—getting up, eating, showering. All I wanted to do was sit in the apartment with Curt playing chess, reading, and doing nothing. Even before the accident, most of what he said went over my head; now it was impossible. I was 30 years old, but all I wanted to do was nothing—and preferably in this apartment. Even watching TV that wasn’t KET was too proactive.
Curt said a little taste would set me right and get me out of my rut.
They’d done this before—try the drugs Curt made. Compounds, as he called them.
One gave Darryl full recall of his nursing lectures, another made every face he saw look like a close childhood friend, another made him forget who he was for an entire afternoon. Curt said he’d done the dishes on that one. Their typical method was to put them in a bowl and draw one out. Each pill had a number.
Curt probably could’ve sold them on campus, but he was really strangely ethical. Other than the bong and the occasional compound, he didn’t drink, smoke, or do any other drugs, and he drove like an old lady. Each one of the compounds usually lasted about fifteen minutes, like mind-altering poppers. I had to be at John Tackett’s office bright and early, or I’d have fished in the bowl for one.
John Tackett was a big guy with a bunch of muscle that had gone to fat. He was great friends with the Judge and really just about the best lawyer money could buy. He drank down at Charlie Brown’s after UK games. Decent guy. Darryl was giving him 20 percent.
“Ok, for your part all you have to do is attend physical therapy and you cannot discuss the accident. For all intents and purposes you need to forget it ever happened.”
“That shouldn’t be hard, I don’t remember it. Where’s the PT, UK Hospital?”
“No, it’s off campus—I’ll give you a card. They want you to see one of their own doctors.”
I made a face. Tackett fell on it.
“It’s 8 million bucks, just go to her. She’s gonna have you squeezing a hand weight like 3 times a week. Relax.”
I said yes, but I dreaded it. I was told the money would kick-start my new life, but I didn’t feel any different.
“You’ve suffered a lot,” Tackett said, but I wasn’t sure that was true.
I made my first visit to the new doctor the next day. Her office was in a strip mall by the racetrack—Red Mile, not Keeneland.
Her office had missing blinds and a single chair blocked by piles of deteriorating cardboard boxes. A few dying ferns sat in cracked and dirty pots. The carpet was patchy. It faced an alley to one side, and the huge concrete building beside it was HQ for the Creighton Foundation. A yellowed fly catcher hung from the ceiling. What looked like blood was splattered in small droplets on the entryway’s faded linoleum.
“Darryl, so glad you could make it. Did you have any trouble finding the place? I’m Dr. Connie LaBlatt, Constance.” She offered her hand.
Darryl stood staring, slack-jawed.
Dr. Constance was a delicate woman with large green eyes, freckles, and a closely shaved head. I followed her to a battered old desk in the corner of the room and had a seat. Her desk was completely covered with composition notebooks, stacks of numbered cards, sea shells, and a list of what looked like Thoroughbred horse names and race schedules.
“Okay, so you’re having some trouble with your memory following the incident?”
He guessed The Incident meant The Accident.
She went on to tell him about what they were going to be working on in physical therapy. It did not at all sound like something he wanted to do; he could already feel the pull of the apartment. Dr. Constance took out a stack of numbered cards and moved through them with him.
The numbers were printed in a blocky font, like something from a label maker. On the back of each card was a date that didn’t match the calendar. Some were in the past. Some were in the future.
When I got home, all I wanted to do was take one of Curt’s pills, didn’t matter which one. I grabbed for one near the bottom and brought it up—#44. I opened one of Curt’s notebooks to see if there was anything on 44.
I don’t think he knows. All efforts are slowed, Darryl has been resistant…
I grabbed a Dr Pepper from the fridge, turned on the ballgame, and took 44 with a deep swig.
THE NUMBER FORTY-FOUR
44 gave me an intense vision that was so weird I wrote it down to show Dr. Connie. It was all I could think about. It showed me and Curt working together at the same university. I got an email from him and it was a genuine surprise because in the dream or whatever it had been—Curt and I did not get along at all. We weren’t exactly friendly in these little flashbacks; we weren’t even on speaking terms—two incompatible personalities.
After a last funding cut saw him let go, I thought I’d never hear from him again. He was the better scientist, but I was a lot better at getting funding. What are you gonna do. The subject line of the email was blank, and I took it for spam. Curiosity got the better of me and I opened it. All it said was:
I’ve Solved it. We Can Go Back.
So it was spam. I decided to give him a courtesy call telling him he’d been hacked. He answered on the third ring.
“I’m glad you called, Thom.”
Why was he calling me Thom?
“I solved it.” The words from his email.
This did not feel like a dream. It felt real, realer than real. I saw my face in the steel door of the lab cabinets—shaved head, maybe 20 pounds lighter—but it was me, wearing a gray shapeless lab coat and pants. It went from being a passive vision to a lucid dream. I was in it.
“What did you solve? What does that mean?”
“Something that blows everything we know out of the water.”
“Quantum travel,” I said. Where did that come from? Educated guess?
Curt scoffed.
“What I have found is beyond looking back. I can GO back—change things.”
“Why are you telling me this? What do you need me for?”
“You’re the best.” He said with an exhalation. “I need people who are willing to do what has to be done. Send your details, I’ll arrange a flight.”
“I haven’t agreed to come.”
“Oh, you’re coming alright. You do not want to miss this.”
The vision faded.
Curt came home and found me with two more 44s in my palm. I tried taking more, but nothing else came to me. Duds, maybe. It felt so real. It was pathetic, but it was the first time since the accident I felt… normal. Like I was awake.
Curt seemed tired. His eyes were deep in his head and rimmed with purple shadows.
“Darryl, have you thought any more about what to spend your money on?” he said, handing me a beer.
“Not a good time,” I said.
“This is a good time. In fact, it is long overdue.”
“I don’t know.” I admitted. “I don’t have a lot of ideas. It doesn’t feel like a fresh start.”
“You don’t think that’s weird, that you don’t have any want to spend this money?”
“I do want to spend it.”
“Okay, so on what?”
I couldn’t think of a single thing.
“It’s because of who you are underneath. I’ve been trying to wake you up for 2 years.”
He was always lecturing me about something—the government, the economy, the climate, consumerism, even how much TV I watched and what I ate.
“Not now, Curt.”
“No, I’m serious.” He said. “I am trying to wake you up. I’m trying to bring forth your buried consciousness. That’s why you can’t remember anything. You’re not Darryl Evans, you’re not a fucking registered nurse. We are both plasma scientists from 2050. I’m serious. You’re a physicist, and I brought you back. Well, I put you into the host body of Darryl Evans. You’re here to help me kill a senator and two other physicists. I’m not joking. We have this conversation all the time. The only difference is if I can’t wake you up soon, they’re gonna kill you.”
“Very funny, Curt. Go to fucking sleep.”
“I am not joking, Darryl. What’s your earliest specific memory?”
He stared at me. I stared back. I could not think of anything at all.
“What’s your mom’s name?”
I could not think of a name.
Curt looked into the distance and kept going.
“You know, during the famines we never had meat. That’s one good thing about coming back—the burgers. I put us in a nice mansion in Ashland Park when I first brought you back. I have all the winning horse names in those notebooks, and Tackett makes our bets. The mansion was too much for you, though. Neither of us could adjust. This dump of an apartment is about as nice as we can do without it feeling fucked. We were in cots at the bunkers when I first met you. The sun and clean water seemed unbelievably luxurious to me when I first took over my host.
I’m gonna show you your number now, tonight. That’s how we bring people back.”
“What are you talking about? Are you fucking high?”
“No, we don’t have a lot of time. There was no accident. You’re having trouble letting go of your host and integrating. If you don’t believe me, then let me ask you again: what is the most clear, intense memory you have?”
“Please, just stop. I was born here in Lexington. I grew up on Tates Creek Road. My mom was a teacher.”
But Curt was right. It was all false. It was like picking up someone else’s vacation pictures from the drugstore.
“You are not Darryl. You have to let me try to bring you back tonight. Or they’re gonna kill you. Specifically, Tackett is gonna kill you.”
“Tackett?”
“Yeah, him and Constance both work with us. We get our orders from way up high, though, and I have to follow them. The mission has to come first.”
“Wait, orders from who? The president?”
“No, it’s a supercomputer. Take the pill. I’m gonna show you your number now. Part of Darryl will still be with you. He was a cameraman for KET. He had a wife and daughter. He was scheduled to die from an embolism. People were just starting to die from that and cardiac failure after the flu pandemic. It was the first sign of damage to the endothelium in our bodies after the infection. It got so much worse just a few years later. Early-onset dementia—that’s what Constance worked on. We put you in right before the death was meant to occur.”
He held up a card.
NUMBER 44, WELCOME BACK.
And it all came back.
The bunkers. The crowding. The hunger. The cold. The weak sunlight. I went to the window and threw it open. I had a bed and a room of my own. We had an entire fridge of fresh food. I felt overwhelmed. Where and when was I?
“Connie, get in here, he’s ready,” Curt said.
Constance came into the kitchen and stood at the window with me.
Connie stood at the window with me, her hand on my shoulder. Her fingers were cold.
“You remember now,” she said. “Good.”
I looked at my hands. They were the same hands I’d had since the accident- knuckles scarred from a fall I didn’t remember taking. But as I watched, the skin seemed to tighten, the scars fading, the lines rearranging themselves like they were being redrawn.
I didn’t answer. I was watching the reflection in the window. My face was still Darryl’s, but it was already sliding away, like wet paint being wiped off glass. The jaw was sharper. The eyes were darker. The shape of the head was different. I could feel the skull changing under my skin, the weight of it shifting.
“I don’t remember dying,” I said.
“You didn’t die,” Connie said. “You were extracted. We pulled you out of 2050, right before the facility collapsed. We sent you back into the host body of Darryl Evans, three months before the accident. The accident was the insertion point.”
Curt handed me a small mirror.
“Look,” he said.
I took it. The face in the mirror was mine, but it wasn’t.
“Thom,” I said. It felt like it had always belonged to me.
“Thom Evans,” Connie said. “Physicist. Plasma division. You were the one who solved the transfer equation.”
I looked at the couch. At the chessboard. At the bowl of pills. At the TV, where the Wildcats were still playing, still trailing, still sounding like the most important thing in the world.
“I had a wife,” I said. “And a daughter.”
Curt didn’t answer.
“I had a wife and a daughter,” I said again. “Darryl had a wife and a daughter. What happens to them?”
“They’re still here,” Connie said. “In this time. In this life. They don’t know you’re gone. They never will.”
I felt something break in my chest. A slow leak, like a pipe freezing in winter.
“I was supposed to be okay,” I said. “I was supposed to start over. I was supposed to get better.”
Curt finally looked at me.
“Thom. You were never supposed to be Darryl. This body was going to die anyway. Embolism. Flu pandemic. You know what happened after. You know what came next.”
“I know,” I said. “But I still feel like I stole his life.”
“You didn’t steal it,” Curt said. “ You’re here to fix what comes after.”
“I don’t want to fix it,” I said. “I want to go back to the apartment. I want to play chess. I want to watch KET and drink Dr Pepper and not think about funding bills or senators or machines that send people backward in time. I want to be the guy who didn’t know.”
Connie’s voice was softer now.
“I know,” she said. “That’s what everyone says. That’s what everyone feels. You’re not the first person we sent back. You won’t be the last. But you’re the one who’s here now.”
I looked out the window. The street was quiet. The black SUV was gone. In its place was a woman standing under a streetlight, holding a folder.
She looked up, directly at me.
I knew her name before she spoke.
“Thom,” she said. “We’ve been waiting.”
I turned to Curt and Connie.
“What do I have to do?” I asked.
Connie’s expression didn’t change, but her voice was heavier.
“The senator,” she said. “Tomorrow night. The game. He votes on the funding bill next week. If it passes, the program shuts down. No rescue. No future.”
Curt handed me a folded piece of paper. A schedule. A seat number. A gun tucked into the waistband of my jeans, cold and unfamiliar.
“You’re not Darryl anymore,” he said. “You’re you. And you’re in the past to change what happens next.”
I looked down at the paper. My handwriting, but not mine. Notes in the margin: after the anthem, before the first timeout.
The TV in the living room kept playing the game. The Wildcats were trailing. The broadcast stuttered -frames stacking on themselves, players moving backward for a split second before snapping forward.
For a moment, the scoreboard read a score that hadn’t happened yet.
Then it went back to normal.
But the numbers on the screen weren’t the same anymore. They were in a different font. The commentary was in a language I didn’t know, but I understood it.
I put the pill down. I didn’t need it anymore.
“I’m going to miss him,” I said softly. “The guy I was. The guy I thought I’d be.”
Curt didn’t answer.
“Let’s go,” I said.
And for the first time since the accident, I didn’t feel like I was wearing someone else’s life.
I felt like I was finally where I was supposed to be.
But I still felt him, Darryl, somewhere under my skin, like a ghost I couldn’t let go of. Like a life I’d never get to live.
Outside, the Wildcats scored. The crowd roared. The city burned holy in that glow again, the way it used to in 2004, the way it never would again.
It was for everyone who was still waiting for the future they were promised.
It was for everyone my age, who grew up thinking the next decade would be better, who watched the world go to hell in slow motion, who survived the pandemic and the crashes and the fires and the floods, who thought they’d be halfway to retirement by now, who thought they’d have time to fix things.
R. Hightower’s work has appeared in Hobart Pulp, Expat Press, Apocalypse Confidential, and Michigan City Review of Books. She serves as an editor at Apocalypse Confidential.