The Portal

 

"Dude, In-N-Out is the fucking Bob Dylan of burger joints."

"Bob Dylan?" Sanjay asked.

"You know, like how people are all obsessed with Dylan? It's not that he isn't a talented songwriter—he absolutely is—but there's this whole fanboy subculture that's developed around him with an outsized impression of his talent and his contribution to the art form that no songwriter could ever hope to live up to. You see the parallels?"

"I guess. I just thought In-N-Out sounded good. You got anything else in mind for lunch?"

"I dunno," Colin said. "You pick something."

"I think I just did."

They both laughed. "Okay. I think I have an idea. It's not great, but we haven't been there in a while."

* * *

The house was a corner lot, perched on a hillside, with a commanding view of the town below. The only ranch style on a street of two-stories, its corner location in an affluent neighborhood unfortunately made it attractive to burglars. In time Colin's grandparents would reluctantly sell the house and move to a house on a hill on the other side of the canyon with a slightly less commanding view, but that was sometime in what was the unforeseeable future.

Young Colin sat in the back seat of the Cadillac, his mom and his grandmother in the front seat carrying on an animated conversation. He only halfway tried to follow. He heard the word damn a lot; they seemed to like that word. They weren't arguing with each other, he could tell that. It was more like they were recounting an unpleasant encounter with a third person, but whom that person was and the substance of the unpleasantness was beyond Colin's seven year old intellect and attention span.

The car's interior smelled of leather and L'Air du Temps. The radio was on a station that played soul-crushingly uninteresting orchestral arrangements of pop tunes—what the broadcast industry of the time called the beautiful music format, and what was sometimes disparagingly referred to as elevator music. The car's ride, with the sound of the engine barely audible and the suspension travel slow and mushy, reflected Detroit's thinking in the 1970s that what made a luxury car luxurious was to completely disassociate the car's occupants from the reality of the road outside. To a young boy in the back seat, the sum of these sensory experiences was disorienting, bordering on nauseating, but as Colin remarked to Heather when his grandmother's ninety-eight years came to a close the summer before, he'd sure like to take just one more ride in that Caddy.

Colin's grandmother parked the car a couple aisles over from the main entrance to the mall. They walked through the main entrance, turned right past Orange Julius and walked down a hall past retailers that included the pet shop, its front window filled with cute puppies, and walked through the entrance to The Broadway.

* * *

Colin parked his Camry a couple aisles over from the main entrance to the mall. 

"Dude, why so far away?" Sanjay asked.

"What? Oh, I guess just habit. C'mon, I could use a little bit of a walk after being cooped up in that cubicle all morning."

"Fair enough. Besides, we've got that all-hands right after lunch. Might as well enjoy the fresh air while we can."

Over the last fifteen years, a number of low-slung buildings sprouted on the outer edges of the lot that the mall stood on, housing every casual dining chain known to humanity. They bustled with activity during the lunch rush, and Colin and Sanjay had to patiently wait their turn in line at Panda Express before carefully searching out the last open table in the place. 

The mall's core was another story, pretty much the same story of every mid-grade mall in the United States. The upscale malls, with their Nords and Neimans and celebrity designer boutiques and top-flight jewelers, the ones whose merchants displayed UnionPay decals in their windows so they could cater to wealthy Chinese clients as well as upper middle class Americans, those malls were doing just fine. The mall of Colin's childhood, where he spent so much of his teenage years going to movies and hanging out with his friends and buying small birthday or Valentine's Day gifts for the girls he dated, didn't make the cut. Broadway pulled out years ago, leaving Walmart to take over the building and close off its access to the rest of the mall. The two other anchor tenants, J. C. Penney and Sears, were gone as well. Colin ate at the peripheral food places from time to time, and would grit his teeth and go into Walmart when it was absolutely necessary, but it had been decades since he last saw the mall's interior.

"Did you hear they're closing the original mall?" Sanjay asked in between bites of orange chicken.

"No."

"End of this month. All these food places will still be here, and the Walmart and any stores that have entrances facing the street, but the stores that you can only get to from inside the mall, their leases are all being terminated and the whole thing's gonna be boarded up."

"So it's just gonna be a glorified strip mall that'll be allowed to rot from the inside?"

"Pretty much."

"A shame. This place would be so much better if the whole thing was just bulldozed and replaced with some kind of mixed use residential-over-retail development, or something like that."

"I know. Have you seen the inside lately?"

"No."

Colin's phone rang. The number was one that wasn't in his contacts, but one that he recognized. He clicked a side button to silence the ringer. He was sure there'd be a voicemail with an 800 number to call.

"Dude, it's creepy. Like YouTube urban archaeology video creepy. It's already pretty much abandoned. You should see it."

"Yeah. Maybe one of these days before it closes." Colin looked at his watch. "Right now, as much as it pains me to say it, we gotta get back for that all-hands."

* * *

Alicia's cubicle was on Colin's way to the conference room, sort of. He found her sitting at her desk, shoes kicked off to one side.

"Greetings."

"Oh, hey," she said, with a half spin of her chair to face him. "How was lunch?"

"Not bad. We wound up at Panda. Couldn't make up our minds."

"You know, there's an In-N-Out not too far from here."

"Is there? I'll have to remember that. Big plans this weekend?"

"I'm doing the marathon. All nine episodes between Friday night and Sunday night."

"Sequentially, or in release order?"

"Sequentially," she said. "I might even sneak in Rogue One in between III and IV."

"Nice," he said.

"How about you?"

"Gonna watch the game with my old college chums."

"Do people still say college chums?"

He smiled. "Well, I do. Anyway, I guess it's about time for the all-hands."

Alicia gave the most glorious eye roll Colin had ever seen, made a half spin in her chair, slid her pair of flats back on, and made another half spin before standing. She and Colin took two empty seats in the conference room next to Sanjay.

"I'd like to thank you all for coming," Rob began. "I'm pleased to announce that we are one tangible step closer to ISO 9000 certification. Thanks to Brad's efforts, the first version of our training procedures is in document control. I think Brad deserves a round of applause."

A smattering of clapping, too halfhearted to call golf applause, bounced around the room.

"We do have one very important issue to work out for what we hope will be the final, audit-ready version of our training procedures, so please give Brad your undivided attention, and your input."

"Our internal auditor Ken reviewed our training procedures, and he was generally pretty impressed," Brad began. "We have step-by-step instructions on how a task is to be trained, and we specify that there is to be a trainer and one or more trainees. Something Ken brought up is that we don't say anything about who trains the trainers. I'd like to get some input on what we can do about that."

An awkward silence filled the room. All Colin could think about was the daunting debugging task that awaited him if this meeting ever ended. He had to do something, so finally he spoke up. "We've got people who've been here for years, and somehow they're shipping code and bringing the newer people up to speed. Can't we just grandfather them in?"

"I don't think that's quite what we're looking for," Rob said.

"Then what the hell are we looking for Rob? I know you want to pretend like all the ideas come from the bottom up, but for chrissakes don't keep us guessing which specific ideas you do and don't want to hear. Give us a hint."

Rob didn't say anything. What the hell, I'm on a roll. "Give me a break. 'Who trains the trainers?' Even if we do come up with an answer, then who trains the trainers that train the trainers? And who trains the trainers that train the trainers that train the trainers? If you work back far enough, you're gonna find out that Alan Turing is dead, and then we're good and screwed."

Most of the people in the room did their best to suppress a giggle. Sanjay and Alicia did a little less than their best.

"Brad, just say we have a core group of senior engineers who were either trained by the universities they graduated from or by the last company they worked for. That should be enough to keep the external auditors happy."

"'Keep the external auditors happy'?" Brad repeated, a look of shock on his face. Christ, Colin thought, if he had shown up to the meeting wearing pearls he'd be clutching them right now. "If all we're doing this for is just to pass an external audit, then I don't even want to go through with ISO 9000 certification." He dropped his three-ring binder on the table for dramatic effect. "We're supposed to be doing this because it will help us to improve our process."

"Oh my God, Brad," Colin said in a low voice, "I had you all wrong. I thought this was all just a way for you to maneuver into a cushy job. You actually believe this shit."

"Okay, emotions are running a little high," Rob said. "Let's table this for now. If anyone has any constructive suggestions, please e-mail them to the ISO 9000 committee's shared inbox. For now we'll move on to the next item. It has come to my attention that we've been getting a little lax again on the company dress code."

* * *

Ninety minutes later, Colin was in his cubicle. He was just beginning to understand the debugging problem in all its complexity, had even set a few breakpoints in the code in hopes of finding where the errant data were being introduced, when Rob stopped by and asked, "Got a minute?"

"I've been going over your records," Rob said in the conference room, "and I found your Myers-Briggs assessment from last spring. You're an INTJ: a personality characterized as introverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging. We have a lot of INTJs and INTJ-adjacent types in this organization. I think this might be a good time to start thinking about re-balancing our team."

"You're gonna make hiring and firing decisions based on Myers-Briggs? This is worse than I thought. I mean, if it’s not working out it’s not working out, but you’re actually going to use some pseudoscientific nonsense to justify personnel decisions? Look, do you have any idea how many neurons there are in the human brain?"

"Uh, millions, I guess?"

"A hundred billion. Those hundred billion neurons each spontaneously organize themselves into networks with some combination of the other 99.999999 billion neurons where a given neuron fires or doesn't fire in response to the ways in which other neurons in the network either fire or don't fire, in literally countless combinations. Everything you think, everything you feel, everything you remember, your likes, dislikes, beliefs, attitudes, your particular approach to solving problems, all of that is contained in the configurations of those networks. But never mind all that. That's too hard. Tell me again how you can distill it all down to sixteen Myers-Briggs types, or four color-coded personalities, or twelve Zodiac signs. Or wait. I've got a better idea. Why don't we skip all that and you can just tell me all about how my cheese is being moved?"

Rob sat impassively the conference table, just waiting for Colin to finish.

"It's been a long day," Colin said, "and it's probably not gonna get much better after I get home. Just tell me what my severance is gonna be so we can both just get out of here.”

"Megan from HR will call you tomorrow with that information. I wish you luck in whatever's next."

"Yeah, me too."

Alicia brought a box to Colin's cubicle. There really wasn't much to pack: a map of the Chicago L system pinned to the inside of the partition, a coffee cup, a few textbooks from college that were more for show than for reference. Alicia leaned over and whispered, "You didn't say anything that the rest of us weren't already thinking," just before Megan arrived to escort Colin to the door.

* * *

"So this weekend is the Cal-Stanford game. A bunch of the guys are getting together."

"Oh, no," Heather said. "We have that shower."

"What shower?"

"My co-worker's daughter is getting married. There's a shower on Saturday."

"Well, not to invoke gender stereotypes or anything, but aren't bridal showers usually a chick thing?"

"This is a couples' shower, and I said we'd be going as a couple."

"Can't you just send my regrets? It’s my alma mater, and these days pretty much the only chance I get to see any of those guys all year."

"You should have thought of that. I told you on Monday."

"It must've slipped my mind."

"More like you weren't paying attention."

"I got shit-canned today."

"Wait. You what?"

"I got fired, but it'll be okay. I'm talking to HR tomorrow. They're gonna have to throw a settlement my way. Fifty is pretty much the new eighty in software. At my age, they're gonna have to make it worth my while to go quietly. And there's still a labor shortage on. I'll find another job. We're gonna be okay. I believe that."

"Great," she said. "Just great."

* * *

The phone call with HR went well, but not as well as Colin had hoped. They'd have enough money to tide them over for a while, and he could go on Heather's insurance, even if he wasn't looking forward to that conversation. He texted Sanjay and they agreed to meet at Panda for lunch.

"That was really an epic meltdown yesterday," Sanjay said. "People are still talking about it."

"Alicia said it was all pretty much what everyone else was thinking."

"Yeah, but dude, honesty is the best policy but there are limits to everything."

"Hey, uh, you mentioned the inside of the mall yesterday. Wanna wander around after lunch?"

"Sorry. I'm gonna have to get back. I don't know if you noticed, but we're a little shorthanded."

"I guess so. Have you had any success figuring out who trains the trainers who train the trainers who train the trainers who train the trainers who train...." He let is voice trail off. They both laughed.

Colin walked alone across the parking lot and through the mall's main entrance. During a week that was shaping up to be a series of disappointments, the inside of the mall might have been the non plus ultra of disappointments. He wasn't sure—or more properly too embarrassed to admit even to himself—what it was he was expecting. Something out of a movie maybe. The mall bustling with shoppers. Orange Julius and Tom McAn and Chess King, all doing a booming business. The pet shop with the cute puppies in the window. And at the end of the north wing, The Broadway. Instead he saw mostly abandoned stores, some cleared out to bare walls and floors, some left in a haphazard mess, a handwritten sign in the window of one proclaiming We are close: We are no longer open. Those stores that remained teetered on the edge of what could be called sketchy: an acupuncturist, a massage spa, a piano store taking up fully three units and not selling any pianos. Ross Dress for Less was nominally still open, but half the floor space was empty, cordoned off by yellow police tape.

Colin had seen enough. He came into this place wanting to feel something—nostalgia, sadness, a connection to the past—but all he felt was contempt for the cheap ass owners and their utter lack of vision and imagination. As he crossed the roadway separating the mall from the parking lot, a pickup sped toward him, as if the threat of running him over would get Colin to hurry up. Given Colin's foul mood, it had the opposite effect. He walked just a bit more slowly and made eye contact, his expressionless face conveying that he was in no hurry. The driver of the truck was forced to wait, for what probably was almost five whole seconds, then accelerated with tires squealing when Colin finally did finish crossing the roadway. A sticker in the back window read Let's Go Brandon.

As Colin pulled his Camry out of the mall parking lot, he noticed something that he hadn't seen before. Catty corner to the mall was a used car lot. The mere existence of a used car lot these days was anachronistic enough, but what was on the lot was not to be believed. Prominently displayed was a crystal blue 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood. It was like the universe was telling Colin that this was meant to be. He pulled in without hesitating. The dealer took his Camry as a trade-in and didn't even seemed worried about Colin's employment status as they worked out the terms.

* * *

"Hi honey," Colin said as Heather walked in the house.

"Where's the Camry?"

"Oh, that. Okay, please don't be mad. Did you see that Cadillac parked on the street? It's ours now. I bought it this afternoon."

"You did what?"

"I bought the Caddy this afternoon. It caught my eye. It's just like the one my grandparents used to have, you know, the one I told you about with the L'Air du Temps and the mushy ride."

"Yes I know. I can't believe you did such a thing. We've got bill collectors banging down the door, you're out of work, and you trade in a perfectly reliable car that's paid off for this, this starry eyed fantasy?"

She stormed down the hall. Colin sat speechless, staring into the dusky grayness of the as yet unlit living room. He finally walked the hall to the bedroom to find her hastily stuffing clothes into a suitcase.

"What are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing, Colin? I can't do this anymore. We never had kids, but right now this is worse than having a kid. You've got no direction, no sense of responsibility, no attention to detail. I remind you about that shower and you act like you've never even heard about it before."

"Oh Jesus. Are we gonna go over that again? I told you I'd go to the goddamn shower."

"No, actually you didn't. You sat there and pouted. Anyway, don't worry about the shower. You can go fuck off with your friends and watch a stupid football game and drink all the beer you want because I won't be here to stop you. Actually, let's just shorten that. You can go fuck off."

She slammed the suitcase closed and walked down the hall. At the end of the hall, she turned one last time. "How did you get fired?"

"I, uh, you know, Rob gave me some song and dance about recalibrating the team or something like that."

"Uh-huh. Did you mouth off during a meeting?"

"Not exactly. I was saying..."

"Did you mouth off during a meeting?"

The silence that followed was all the answer she needed. She turned and walked out the door.

* * *

Colin slept in the next morning, showered, dressed, walked out to the Cadillac, and turned the key. The starter motor ran for a few seconds to no effect. He pumped the accelerator pedal and turned the key again. After a few seconds with the starter turning, he pumped the accelerator more until the motor finally began turning, roughly, under its own power. He pressed the accelerator about a quarter of the way down, bringing up the revs from idle speed until the motor smoothed out—a little. He drove by the mall, then turned up the hill to a street he had driven past countless times, but hadn't actually driven on in decades. He parked in front of the only ranch style house on a street that was otherwise all two-stories. At eleven on a Friday morning, the street was deserted, the houses all either empty or their occupants not bothering to come outside. The house had a spacious two-car garage, so it would be impossible to know for sure, but there were no cars in the driveway or on the street. He got out of the car and cautiously walked up to the front entrance. The curtains in the front window were drawn open, and the living room looked completely lifeless. With a sense of trepidation, but without really thinking about what he was doing, he tried the front door. It opened.

He realized from the moment he walked in that it was all wrong. The furniture was completely different—that was to be expected—but the flooring and the color of the paint on the walls had all changed too. He walked into the kitchen, which was too modern to have been original. It struck Colin that not only was the place unrecognizable, but he would be hard pressed to describe in any kind of detail what it looked like all those years ago anyway. He walked across the kitchen to the family room, and looked out the picture windows. As he stood admiring a view that was as commanding as he remembered it, Colin heard a click, a sound that  he had only ever heard in movies.

"Keep your hands where I can see them and turn around real slow."

Colin followed the directions without a second thought, and turned to see that he was looking down the barrel of a Glock. The Glock's owner, and presumably the house's owner, held the gun steadily with two hands.

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't just pop you right here and now."

"Because I'm not here to rip you off."

"What?"

"I'm not here to rip you off. Look around. I have no break-in tools. No bags or boxes or anything to haul stuff away in. Look outside. My getaway car is an old tuna boat that runs on seven cylinders, and not always the same seven. You're not being jacked. I'm just a dumbass software developer who walked into the wrong house."

"You're a software developer?" Glock Guy asked, still holding the gun on Colin. "Cool. What stack?"

"My last project was Node on the back end and Angular for the UI. Before that I was doing LAMP. Well, it was PHP running against a MySQL database with Apache for the web server, but after the first year we migrated it from a Linux box to a Windows box."

Glock Guy kept the gun trained on Colin's midsection. "So it's really WAMP."

"Yes, but we still called it LAMP because it sounds cooler."

"Okay, so what the fuck are you doing in my house?"

"You're gonna think it's stupid."

"Try me."

"My grandparents used to live here. A long time ago. I've been going through a lot of shit lately and was feeling nostalgic and, you know that Twilight Zone episode where the guy walks from the gas station to the town he grew up in and meets his younger self?"

"Oh yeah." Still pointing the gun. "I love that show. Hey, how about the one where the six year old kid can control things with his mind and wish people into the cornfield? That kid's fucked up."

"Okay, but stay with me, huh? Focus, for chrissakes. Anyway there's another Twilight Zone episode where a guy listens to an antique radio and it takes him back in time. Or then there's that movie Midnight in Paris where Owen Wilson gets picked up by an old car and transported back to Paris in the 1920s. As crazy as it sounds, I guess I've been looking for a way back. I went to the mall yesterday where I used to go as a kid, but it turned out to be just a creepy half-deserted mall. On a lark I bought a car like my grandparents had. It's a piece of shit. Then I came to the house where there were sleepovers and holiday dinners and casual get-togethers and I wind up meeting some goddamn trigger-happy Rambo wannabe."

"Hey! That's completely out of line. I haven't been trigger-happy."

"I'm not sure what the hell I was thinking, but I was hoping to find some kind of portal to a less stressed-out time, even if only to take a short break."

Glock Guy safed the gun, set it on the counter, and laughed lightly while shaking his head. "Dude, that's just a plot device. There is no mystic portal. You know what two of those three stories have in common? At some point the protagonist realizes that he doesn't belong in the past. And the guy with the old radio? It's just a storyteller's way of describing a sad old man so wrapped up in his missed opportunities and so desperate to fix his past mistakes that it's entirely beside the point whether he literally gets a second chance or whether the second chance is in his mind. Are you trying to correct some past mistake?"

"Well, no. I just—"

"I'm gonna save you a lot of trouble right now. There's no magical way back, there's only a way forward." He extended his hand, "I'm Paul."

"Nice to meet you Paul. Colin."

"What dev shop are you working in these days, Colin?"

"Remember when I said I'm going through a lot of shit? I'm kinda between jobs right now."

"You have a card or something? The recruiter I've been working with is awesome. I can give her your contact information if you like." Colin reached into his wallet and handed Paul a card. "Today's my day off. We work four tens. Feel free to hang out and look around for a while. Want a beer?"

"I guess it's close enough to noon. Sure."

* * *

On Monday Colin called Alicia.

"How was the Star Wars marathon?"

"Only everything I ever hoped it would be."

"Fantastic. Hey, since I don't really get to see much of the old gang anymore, I was maybe wondering if you'd like to get together this week, you know, for a drink or dinner or something."

"Aw, that's really sweet. Maybe some other time."

Colin tapped the red button on his phone and chuckled self consciously. Another plot device. In his case the hero didn't get the girl. He'd make it a point to call again in a week or two, just on the off chance that she literally meant some other time. If she gave him the brush-off, she gave him the brush-off. Maybe he could find a way to patch things up with Heather, or maybe he could spend some time just working on him and then see who else stumbled into his life. His phone rang. The number was one that wasn't in his contacts, but this time he didn't recognize it. Probably Paul's recruiter. He tapped the green button and slowly, tentatively, began finding a way forward.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.