I'll Stop the World (95)

I don’t matter.

I have never mattered.

I never will matter.

And there’s nothing I can do about it. It was stupid to believe there was.

I fist my fingers into my hair and twist, hard enough that I hear strands ripping free of my scalp. I want to tear my stupid, useless body apart. Shred it to pieces and let it scatter in the wind. Tears burn my eyes as I let out a scream.

“Justin!”

Rose pulls onto the shoulder of the road and stops the car, then grabs my wrist. I realize I’ve been punching the dashboard. My knuckles are red and raw. “What’s going on?” Her eyes dart between me and the road, one hand on the wheel, one still clamped on my wrist.

It all comes pouring out. Seeing Karl on the riverbank. Throwing rocks at the kids. Falling and mangling my knee. Karl admitting he started the fire at Mrs. Hanley’s. Realizing that Stan and I have the same scar.

Rose shakes her head, her forehead crinkling a little as she presses the tips of her fingers to her lips. “So . . . Stan is you?”

I nod, feeling a fissure begin to spread through my insides, wondering how long I can hold it together before I shatter. “I’m never getting back,” I say, my voice cracking. “We never had a chance of solving this case. Stan’s spent his whole life trying to do it, and he’s never gotten anywhere.” I force myself to say it. “I never get anywhere.”

That does it.

The dam inside me bursts, and all the fear and confusion and hopelessness come pouring out in giant, hiccuping laugh-sobs. I try to hold it in, but that just makes it worse.

“I . . . hated . . . him,” I gasp through spasms of violent laughter, tears streaming down my face. “My whole life, I’ve thought he was the biggest asshole on the planet. And he’s me.”

I get out of the car and hobble into the middle of the road, throwing my arms wide to the sky.

“What are you doing?” Rose calls, but I shake my head, spinning in a circle.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Get back here before you get hit by a car.”

I stop spinning and face down the road, keeping my arms raised. “Hit me!” I scream to no one, and to everything. “I fucking dare you!”

“Justin!”

“What?” I turn to face her. “Don’t you get it? Nothing matters,” I shout. “Not me, not you, not this ridiculous quest we’ve been on all week. It’s all meaningless bullshit! Everything is pointless!”

“Stop it!” she yells at me. “Seriously, Justin, get out of the road. Then we can talk about this.”

“Or what, I could die?” Another burst of wild laughter. “Can I die? Am I invincible? I mean, Stan lived, so I live, right? Maybe I could get hit by a car and walk away!”

“You can barely walk now,” Rose points out.

I look at her over my shoulder, through blurry eyes. “Touché.” That sends me into another fit of giggles.

Rose gives up on persuasion and marches onto the pavement, taking my arm. I let her lead me back off the road, where I collapse onto the grass, drained of all energy. “So,” she says, “you don’t get back.”

“Nope.”

“So the question is, what are you going to do now?”

I fight down another burst of laughter. “Do? I guess I’m going to turn into an angry, obsessive old man with no friends who never does anything with his life.”

She shakes her head. “You’re telling me what he did. I’m asking what you are going to do.”

“Have you not been paying attention? He is me.”

“No—he’s Stan. He’s the result of some other Justin who went into the past and never made it back. But that doesn’t make him you. You can still do things differently than he did.”

“Some other . . . Are you high? There’s only one me.”

“There are two of you in 2023.”

“Yeah, but they’re still both me. One’s just older than the other.”

“You don’t know that they’re you you. Maybe this keeps happening, and you keep going back into the past, but each time you do things a little differently. Maybe there are a bunch of alternate universes where you make different choices. Maybe in some of them, you do make it back. Maybe every version of you is a little bit different.”

“So now, instead of two of me, you’re saying there are, like, hundreds?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, that’s terrifying.”

“Or it means you have free will, and your choices do matter, because this version of you has never existed before.”

“But what if that’s not how it works? What if this is just a loop, and there’s just me and Stan, doing the same things over and over for infinity?”

Rose shrugs. “Then you have nothing to lose.”

I frown. Much as I would like to believe that there’s a way out of this, I just don’t see it. I mean, look at the scar. I made all my choices leading up to that believing that I could change things, that I could make a difference, and I still did everything exactly the same way that Stan did, down to getting hit with a rock and falling at the precise angle and moment that would give me the exact same scar.

“I just don’t see the point,” I say wearily. “I’ve watched him try to solve this case my whole life. The fire happens tomorrow, and we still have no idea who does it. How am I going to do in twenty-four hours what he couldn’t do in almost thirty-eight years?”