Chapter 11 – And So the Journey Continues

June 26th – 27th, 2011

2011 Counterparts

They crossed the border into Pennsylvania by nine that evening, and by nine-thirty were encroaching upon Pittsburgh. Marty looked somewhat longingly at the exit sign that would take them through Pittsburgh, but didn't turn; it felt as though his curiosity was almost getting the better of him after what seemed like the endless ride from California that had so far been full of frustrations, quarreling brothers, and the anxiety stemming from not knowing if a scenario would work out the way they needed it to. At the very least, they were running ahead of schedule, and would arrive in West Orange well in plenty of time to meet up with the 1998 versions of himself and Doc.

The lights lining the highway flashed the interior of the car rhythmically as they sped on. Marty happened to glance over at Jules as the light hit his face and just for a moment, Marty could see Doc in him. He looked quickly back to the road, trying to push back difficult memories of one of the last conversations he'd had with the Doc about a week before his death.

Marty had come over to drop off some medication he'd picked up for Doc at the pharmacy. The pharmacist had known both Marty and the Brown family for so many years that it wasn't at all unusual for Marty to pick up something for Doc if it was convenient, and Marty never minded; it gave both he and Doc a good excuse to talk for an hour or so, catching up on one another's lives and reminiscing on some of their adventures.

Doc had pulled three bottles of pills out of the crinkly white pharmacy bag and tsked disapprovingly. "Marty, eventually a man lives long enough to wonder if it's really in good taste for him to still be kicking around in the mortal realm."

"The man who has a Big Mouth Billy Bass hanging in his garage is talking about good taste?"

Doc ignored him but smirked. "Look at these pills. I've got more pills than I do damns about living to be ancient. Immortality won't come from a computer or a god, Marty. It'll come from these damn pills. Everlasting life, available at a pharmacy near you. I could patent that catchphrase and retire."

"You'll never retire. That's why you're the Doc, Doc."

Doc continued to study the pill bottles thoughtfully for a moment before saying, "I need you to promise me something, Marty."

Marty, who'd picked up a mechanical gizmo while Doc had been talking and examined it closely until a tiny arm shot out and tried to grab his nose, slammed the piece back on the work table and nodded innocently. "Sure, Doc. Anything."

"I need you to keep an eye on Jules and Verne when I'm gone. Now look!" he'd proclaimed in that I'm-not-crazy way of his, pointing a finger at Marty. "They're grown men, Marty, but I'm still their father and I still worry about them. You've got your own family to look after, but don't forget about this one. Especially Jules. He's liable to turn into one of those hermits living off dried lima beans and trying to invent a device to communicate with domestic felines if he doesn't have any human contact."

Marty laughed. "C'mon, Doc, he isn't that bad. Have a little faith."

"I know, I know," Doc said, waving him away. "I love both of them, very much! More than life itself, and I'd gladly give mine for either one of theirs, same as you would for your children. But Jules gets wrapped up in the ideas in his head far more than Verney ever did. Verney's trouble is that he rushes into things headlong, and then is surprised when things fall apart. He sometimes doesn't think enough, and Jules sometimes thinks too much." Doc shook his head in amazement. "They grew up in the same house, with the same parents, and even in the same room. And yet there are days when I swear those two came out of completely different wombs altogether!"

Marty shrugged and crossed his arms. "Jimmy and Robin are the same way. Robin tutored Jim in high school physics while she was still in sixth grade, but he was the one who had to teach her how to catch a ball so she wouldn't flunk gym class. Of course, her success in physics was mainly down to your tutoring of her, but still. You can never tell."

"Just look in on Jules and Verne once in a while, Marty. Make sure they're all right," Doc urged, as he sat tiredly on a stool in the lab. "I'll feel better about going if I know someone I trust is always there to lend them a hand if they ever need it. And someone to give them hell if that they know that's what I would have done."

"Doc, look, you're going to be around to give them hell for a long time yet," Marty said in what he hoped was a bright tone. "And don't sweat it. Why wouldn't I be around for Jules and Verne? They're practically my brothers, right?"

Doc smiled. "Pills can't keep me alive forever, Marty. Not yet. And I wouldn't want them to, even if they could. Death is the last great adventure for a scientist. It's just too bad I can only perform the experiment once."

Marty squirmed a little; he hated talking about this sort of stuff with Doc. "Well, just don't go rushing towards that big laboratory in the sky quite yet, all right Doc?"

Ten days later, Marty attended Doc's funeral.

Marty squirmed in the car seat, mimicking his motions from that conversation. To think that he'd already said goodbye to Doc, already watched him being lowered into the ground, and already made peace with the fact that his dearest friend was no more, to now find himself speeding towards a place and a time when Doc would suddenly appear out of the sky healthy and exuberant as ever...it made Marty shiver slightly.

He threw a glance to Jules and Verne and noted without surprise that they were both still fast asleep. He caught sight of a trickle of drool shimmering from the side of Verne's mouth just as Verne snorted in his sleep and Marty cringed. "Jesus, no wonder Clara used to call him her 'little piggy'," he muttered to himself, bringing his gaze back to the dash. The gas tank was steadily falling under the quarter-tank mark and the car was pushing towards the border, where little more than deserted highway and darkness was there to greet them until dawn broke in several hours. With a languid sigh that was half-relief and half-weariness, Marty spotted a gas station ahead and decided to take the opportunity to fill up the gas tank, take a leak and maybe stock up on some energy drinks for the drive ahead. He could settle up with Jules and Verne later.

He stepped into the cool night air gratefully, as though it were made just for his pleasure after being cooped up in a car for the better part of the day. After glancing at his watch and finding it to still be on the outer fringes of what could be called a 'respectable hour', he called Jennifer while waiting for the gas tank to fill and let her know that he was all right, Jules and Verne were all right, and that he'd keep her updated. Hanging up and looking across the hilly terrain that surrounded them, he took an odd measure of comfort in knowing that he was married to perhaps the only person on earth who wouldn't demand an immediate explanation of his hasty departure and the scant reasoning for it. But it had always been that way with Jennifer - an absolute trust, an unbreakable bond, and an unspoken understanding. All he'd ever wanted was to be good enough to deserve it.

The gas station was of newer construction, one of the bright and shiny new models of gasoline stations that only half existed for the sake of gas; prepacked meals, designed to eat on the road, sat before any traveler that wandered in, as well as a veritable grocery store and toy emporium, filled with everything from cat food and Windex to stuffed animals and glue. Marty finished in the restroom and grabbed a small basket, preparing to do a little shopping.

"How are ya," he mumbled half-heartedly with a nod to the lone clerk behind the counter, a mammoth in a bright red shirt and name-tag. "Nice night out there."

"About like any other night," the clerk answered with a shrug. He shifted his weight slightly; Marty was his first customer in close to an hour and he wasn't above making some chitchat for the sake of alleviating boredom and loneliness. "Going far?"

"New Jersey, actually," Marty called back to the clerk as he grabbed two cold energy drinks from the back refrigerator case, then made his way to the candy aisle, throwing in a Snickers bar for himself and a few Hershey bars for Verne, who loved them.

"You got a long way to go."

"Hm? Oh. Oh, yeah, well actually, I'm on my way to see a - a friend," Marty stammered, slowly but truthfully, as he stuck a plastic cup under the hot coffee dispenser and waited for it to fill up. "Yeah. It'll be good to see him again," he said in a quiet voice, biting his lip slightly as he thought of what lay before them, unsure if it would even be enough to save them.

"It might not work," the clerk said.

"Well, we've got to at least try," Marty shot back quickly before he caught himself and looked over the clerk, who was pointing at the coffee machine.

"What?"

"Nothing, nothing," Marty replied, running a hand through his hair.

"I meant the coffee machine. Give it a minute. Sometimes needs a minute to warm up."

Marty nodded, left his cup there, and began perusing the store. His eyes fell on a rack of cassette tapes at the end of one of the aisles. "I'll be damned. There's a blast from the past," he chuckled, picking up an AC/DC cassette tape. "Haven't seen a cassette for sale in years."

"Yeah, can ya beat that?" the clerk said derisively with a short laugh. "The owner has another station - an old Citgo about ten miles east of here - and keeps stock in the back. He ran across a box of cassettes been sitting in that place for prob'ly close to a decade and dragged 'em over here, thinkin' people would buy 'em. They're just takin' up space, in my opinion."

Seeing that his coffee was only just then beginning to trickle out of the machine in a sad little stream, Marty picked through the tapes. He stopped his gaze landed on Sports, an old Huey Lewis and the News album. Cracking a grin, he tipped it out of the rack and scanned the tracks, memories flooding back. "Man, this used to be just about my favorite album," he said, more to himself than to the clerk. "I had this on vinyl and cassette for the longest time. Don't know what happened to either of them."

"Huey Lewis? Yeah, I remember them. Weren't too bad."

"They were great," Marty said, somewhat defensively. "Used to play in a band that was basically a glorified Huey Lewis cover band back in high school." He hesitated for a moment and then cupped the tape in his hand protectively. Having some tunes playing in the beat-up cassette deck in the car would help keep him awake, he figured. "What the hell. For nostalgia's sake."

"Good a reason as any," the clerk responded with another shrug.

His purchases made, Marty jogged back out to the car, put his coffee in the drink holder, threw the bag of junk food and caffeine in the back, and after noting that Jules and Verne were still dead to the world, slipped the tape in the cassette deck. The first track began to play softly on the speakers as Marty pulled out of the gas station and back onto the highway, his mind already back in Hill Valley in the mid-80's.

When he thought of the 80's, only three things came back to him immediately: Doc, Jennifer, and his room. It wasn't unusual for someone to have strong memories of his or her childhood room, or exactly what posters were on the wall or exactly what books were on the shelf, but Marty had the distinct prerogative of having had two childhood rooms that were different from each other while still being in the exact same place at the exact same time.

When Marty had finally returned home after his jaunts through time, he found himself inhabiting a house and a family that he, personally, had never been a part of - at least, not Marty McFly as he'd always been. The other Marty McFly had grown up in a family with a happy, confident, successful father and a happy, confident, successful mother, as opposed to him, who had grown up with the exact opposites of his "new" parents. All of his basic memories about his family were correct - he had a brother and a sister, he'd gone to Disney World when he was six, the small crack in his bedroom window came from a tumble he'd taken the first time he'd come home drunk - but as to the personalities of his "new" family...well, that was a whole other keg of beer. It had taken close to a year until he was entirely comfortable with his new situation. That wasn't to say that there weren't distinct advantages of his new life - these were many - but his family had more than once thrown him a questioning glance when he'd let slip with some factoid of his "old" family. His parents had grudgingly blamed adolescence or a bad memory, which Marty felt content with letting them believe, as it was a lot easier than explaining the truth. Neither had they ever voiced whatever similarities they'd noticed between he and Calvin Klein, if in fact they ever had noticed. It had occurred to Marty that since his parents had raised him, perhaps they were blind to those similarities, or maybe they believed that they had influenced Marty into displaying those similarities, as they now possessed those similarities imparted by Calvin Klein. Marty had spent a lot of time during those years trying not to think about it too much - there was too much that he knew he'd never be able to answer for.

But the music was and always had been exactly the same. Maybe that's why Sports had always been so important to him as a young adult; it was an old constant in an otherwise new universe.

He'd fought hard to fit into this new universe. Doc had fought hard for it too, in his own way. Which led him to wonder - just why was Jules risking all of it to make a new time machine? When had he gotten that idea? Jules had certainly never talked about missing travelling through time. He'd never spoken about historical mysteries he wanted to solve, or a longing to visit other times, nor had he ever shown a curiosity towards ancient questions with no modern answers. In other words, he'd never expressed any reasons for wanting to build a time machine.

It just didn't make sense.

The electric sounds of Huey Lewis kept him company through the night as he passed a whole lot of nothing. Marty finished his coffee and had gotten through one of the sickly-sweet energy drinks he'd picked up at the gas station before he saw the telltale signs of sunrise approaching. The land seemed to glow orange around him, and he couldn't decide if it was the muted hues of oncoming daylight or simply a side effect of the wired feeling courtesy of the caffeine, but he pulled into a rest stop at the border of some Pennsylvania town he hadn't ever heard of, and silently declared to himself that his driving shift was over, whether or not Jules and Verne were finished sleeping.

He got out of the car, stretched and scratched his sides, yawning into the early morning sun. Other drivers who had pulled into the rest stop seemed to be doing much the same; surreal nights passed behind the wheel of a speeding car made daylight seem almost intrusive on the thoughts of such wanderers.

On the far end of the parking lot sat a bench overlooking what appeared to be, for lack of a better term, a dirty stream of water, which appeared to widen on the horizon near a copse of trees. Marty made his way over to the bench, more to stretch his legs than anything, but sat gratefully overlooking the landscape nonetheless. His thoughts again drifted back to the strange quagmire of emotions he felt about his looming meeting with Doc and a younger version of himself, a self that was a relatively new father, a relatively new husband, and...well, cosmically speaking, a relatively new human at only 30 years of age.

"You think differently about yourself at that age," he said quietly to a group of birds that had gathered near the bench to peck at the ground. "You don't think you've got time to change things - you think it's all set in stone. This is my job, this is my family, this is my town, and it's never going to change. But it does." He sighed. "It does change."

Marty remembered sitting in the mortgage closing office, sweating slightly as his hand hovered over a blank line that only needed his scrawled signature to officially give him the title of "homeowner." He guessed that some people's lives only flashed before their eyes as they were dying, but his life had flashed through his mind as he had sat there in that uncomfortable plastic chair, an electric fan buzzing somewhere near his ear, Jennifer's purse making a slight rustling sound as she gripped it in her lap. A second later, as though through no action of his own, he looked down to find his signature there on the page.

That signature was supposed to be the autograph of a rock star, he remembered thinking to himself. Fans were supposed to scream for it. Autograph collectors would pay for it. And here it is - just the ordinary signature of an ordinary guy who just bought thirty years' worth of debt. It had felt like the last forfeit of those high school dreams that had started with a scratchy demo tape made in Johnny Clegg's garage.

And that was the guy Marty was going to see again in just a few hours.

He ran a hand through his hair tiredly. Why was he even thinking about this stuff? He had basically everything he'd ever wanted - he had Jennifer, he had the kids, he even had his own recording studio for Christ's sake.

So why did he suddenly feel as though he was second-guessing his entire life?