In eighth grade, Charlie Fairbanks was having the time of his life. While the other students were fighting acne or picking food out of their braces, Charlie was at his physical peak. In the fall, he was captain of the cross-country team and set a record for the fastest mile run in Rolling Ridge Middle School history. In the winter, he was the princely star of Sleeping Beauty and got to kiss Molly Chambers to wake her up in all four performances. In the spring, he won first place in the Super Mario Bros 3 all-night fundraising marathon for the local orphanage. On weekends and over the summer, Charlie and his friends (and he had many friends), spent countless hours at the arcade, where Charlie set even more records. He was the local champion of Street Fighter II and NBA Jam, of which he had locked in all ten high score slots with the initials CF1. His initials also made a showing at least once or twice in the top ten of every other game he tried his hand at. And when he wasn’t racking up scores, he was making out with Molly Chambers, who had fallen in love with him ever since being kissed awake on stage.
Without a doubt, Charlie Fairbanks was in his prime.
Though as is the nature with growing up, eighth grade turned into ninth grade… And in high school, the boy who had once been the fastest, the most talented, and the most attractive, became the average-est, the medium-est, and the most acned. Molly Chambers dumped him on the eve of the Homecoming dance to go with a senior instead. He found himself relegated to the junior varsity cross-country team and was cast as Townsperson Number Five in Romeo & Juliet. His once reliable group of friends began to drift away, trading in arcade weekends for other more mature interests, like cars, concerts, and, on rare occasion, contraceptives. Charlie had largely ignored schoolwork during his middle school glory, and he suddenly discovered that he was painfully behind in every subject. In fact, time seemed to move faster with each passing year, and the boy who was once at the front of the pack found himself trailing in every single rat race.
The only place that Charlie’s eighth grade glory lived on was in his well-worn 1995 yearbook. It was positioned prominently on his bookshelf. He fondly remembered those days every time he sat down, picked it up, and flipped through its pages…
No matter that he was sitting on the toilet, under a buzzing compact fluorescent lightbulb, in the cramped bathroom of his dumpy one-bedroom apartment. It was the closest to a throne that he had achieved in his thirty-eight years. Charlie’s evenings were no longer filled with cross-country blue ribbons, or standing ovations after his latest performance, or all-night gaming marathons with his pals. And as nice as it would have been to spend all evening sitting on the toilet reminiscing about such things, it just wasn’t possible — Charlie had sensitive skin, after all — so he spent most of his time sitting on his frumpy couch with a video game controller in his hand. Though it wasn’t an ergonomically designed controller with vibration motors and buttons galore. Rather, it was a controller for his Nintendo Entertainment System — one of the original consoles, mind you, not one of the crappy modern miniature ones (having to blow into the cartridges to make the games work was part of the charm). The only problem was that even though his mind knew all of the secrets and shortcuts through Super Mario Bros 3 (not that he ever actually used a warp whistle), his thumbs just weren’t as nimble as they used to be. If it wasn’t the darn bouncing octopuses in World 3-5 that ended his run, it was the absurd flying spiky turtle thrower in World 5-8. And if they weren’t a problem that day, it was the impossible to predict piranha plants in World 7-7 or the darn ghosts in one of the many castles that got him.
Every time the tragic “Game Over” ballad played, he wouldn’t react with anger or sadness. He wouldn’t throw his controller (it was far too valuable for that) or let out a yell of frustration. Rather, he would just sit there and absorb it in silence. Inevitably, his eyes would wander around his living room, taking in the posters for Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and The Smashing Pumpkins. It wasn’t that Charlie was a purest to one era or anything so simple minded as that… It was just that, in his opinion, there hadn’t been anything truly worthy since then.
When he was playing Nintendo or listening to his Nirvana CDs, Charlie found that he could still feel glimmering echoes of the joy he had felt in his youth. But when he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, reality stared right back. Sometimes, he hardly recognized the reflection of a man sliding precariously towards middle age. His round frame was flabby around the edges, and somehow, he always looked a little bit scruffy, even just a few minutes after shaving. Inevitably, he would find himself gazing deep into his eyes, studying the man who was once a gregarious leader with his whole life ahead of him… But that boy was long gone. Though what that boy had been replaced with wasn’t sadness… Or hopelessness… Or any of the other dreadful words ending in -ness for that matter… Charlie Fairbanks was just… Empty.
He was as empty as the abandoned buildings he traipsed through day in and day out. Bolt cutters were the most common tool of his trade, which he used to cut rusted Master Locks off of rusted doors. Then with loud screeches of disapproval, he would swing the doors open, swipe aside the curtain of cobwebs, and step into the decrepit, forgotten spaces that were his responsibility to inspect. Most were adorned with more rat poop and cockroaches than any normal person would see in a lifetime. After filling in all of the blanks and signing the bottom of his paperwork, Charlie would slap a “Condemned!” sticker on every door in sight. Then he would dust off his building inspector jacket and traipse back to his county pickup truck that was nearly as rusty as most of the locks that he cut. There, he ate his turkey sandwich, munched his Funyuns, washed them down with his Wild Cherry Pepsi, and topped it off with a pair of Hostess Cupcakes.
It wasn’t that he was alone in the world, per se… He just didn’t have a place in it anymore. His old friends had all moved to different parts of the country, and their formerly substantive conversations had all degenerated into text messages on each other’s birthdays and the occasional “Like” on posts. Every month or so, he’d babysit his twelve-year-old nephew, Falcon. Charlie had no idea why his sister named her son after a bird of prey, but given that she was a respected social media manager with a swank condo in the city, who was Charlie to judge. He valiantly tried to teach his nephew the joys of Nintendo and Pearl Jam, but Falcon’s only interests were watching TikToks and sending Snaps to his friends. On Sundays, Charlie would have dinner with his dad, chewing quietly as his divorced old man lambasted him to “get off his ass” or “go get married.” Friday nights were Charlie’s only reprieve, when he frequented a local dive bar named Divots — the same bar he’d been going to since he was old enough to pass for 21. There, he reminisced about the good ol’ days with other townies who had stuck around. Molly Chambers stopped by one night when she was visiting for the holidays, only for Charlie to learn that she was married with two kids and living in a six-bedroom house in the suburbs of Chicago. She was a doctor at the children’s hospital and her husband was a photographer for National Geographic. Charlie did his best to pretend to be interested while Molly swiped through her husband’s photos of critically endangered Ganges River Dolphins in the freshwaters of Nepal, but all the while, Charlie was busy dying inside. As he lay on his creaky bed that night, he found that he couldn’t sleep a wink, his mind racing, trying to pinpoint the moment when his life had gone so horribly wrong.
But little did he know that in a few short hours, his life would forever change…
It was a day that started out like any other. His alarm went off at the usual time. His rusty county truck had the usual trouble starting after a cold night. And there wasn’t a single task on his schedule to look forward to besides chowing down on his Funyuns and cupcakes. He pulled up to his first stop of the day with the same lack of enthusiasm — really a lack of anything — that he brought to every day of work. It was a warehouse that some eager business owner had chosen to paint white once upon a time, but that pristine color had long since melted away into a sad combination of rust red and dirt brown tears. The place was on its last legs. Charlie picked up his clipboard in one hand and his bolt cutters in the other, and trudged towards the metal door shielding the cobwebs and rat poop from the world. As he hefted his bolt cutters towards the rusty lock, he suddenly realized… There was a Master Lock on the door… But this one was new and shiny… And moreover, it was hanging open.
That’s odd… he thought to himself.
Charlie glanced around, put off balance by the unexpected development. That was when he noticed there were at least two dozen cars parked nearby. They were all covered in layers of dust, like they had been parked there for some time. It wasn’t particularly unusual for Charlie to see a junker or two abandoned outside of one of the buildings he inspected and condemned, but to see so many cars was extremely unusual.
Charlie set down his bolt cutters in the back of his pickup before pulling out his phone to double check the address. Sure enough, he was in the right place, with the correct numbers just barely visible in faded black paint on the wall. With one more glance this way and that, Charlie cautiously approached the building’s door. He reached out, grabbed the handle, and gave it an aggressive yank —
The door swung open with the silent ease of brand-new hinges bathed in WD-40.
Then Charlie gasped, pushing the door closed just as fast as he had opened it. He could’ve sworn he heard music inside. But that couldn’t be. Perhaps he was hearing things after getting so little sleep. Certain he was mistaken, he took a steadying breath and gently pulled the door open once again.
But he wasn’t delirious, because his ears were greeted by the reverberating bass line and twangy guitar of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” His nose took in the wafting scent of fresh pizza, baked pretzels, and cotton candy. And his eyes fell upon the most unbelievable sight… It was something he hadn’t seen in more than two decades…
It was an arcade straight out of the 1990s. It was an arcade of his youth. The games were those that he had grown up playing — Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Turtles in Time, Tekken, Cruis’n USA, and most importantly, NBA Jam — along with all of their flashing lights and alluring synth soundtracks that they blared out into the world. Vibrant pools of red, blue, and green light cycled on and off with the beat of the music, cutting through the party smoke in the air.
Only this wasn’t some new-age bar that tried to capture the nostalgia of old. No… This place radiated genuine authenticity. It felt like the arcade that he had spent so much time at in his youth. It even smelled like it.
“What in the world…” he wondered aloud, though no one could hear him over the cacophony of sound. His body was unable to resist the magnetism of it, and he crossed the threshold, stepping inside.
His all-too-modern instincts pulled his eyes down to the phone in his hand where the address had been listed a moment before. But his phone was gone, as if it had vanished into thin air. Though that wasn’t what startled Charlie the most… It was his hand. He raised it up to his eyes, studying it in the dim light bouncing around the arcade.
His hand looked… Younger. It was no longer chubby with dark hair on his knuckles. All of the scratches and scars that had built up after so many years of spelunking through crawl spaces and attics were gone as well.
His entire body felt good too… So much better than it had in years. He realized that his gut wasn’t sticking out. He could actually see his belt buckle… And his pants were so loose they were practically falling off his hips… Which suddenly made Charlie reach his hands up to feel his face. He was startled to discover that his skin was smooth, his cheeks weren’t nearly as round, and there wasn’t a hint of stubble anymore.
He rushed towards the nearby prize counter, outfitted with flashing lights and bling galore. But he was focused on the mirrors behind all of the colorful prizes. It was there that he saw the most unbelievable thing he had seen in his entire life.
In the reflection, he saw the spitting image of the boy from his eighth grade yearbook. The person staring back at him was thirteen-year-old Charlie. He was still wearing his building inspector’s uniform that he put on every morning. It was just oversized and baggy on his skinny frame. Charlie’s mouth hung open, trying to make sense of the impossible sight, but he didn’t have time to figure it out before he heard someone say —
“How many tickets you got, home skillet?” It was a teenager who was a couple years older than him in an MTV t-shirt walking down from the snack bar.
But Charlie just stared back at him with his thirteen-year-old jaw hanging open. His brain was working harder than it had in ages, and it still couldn’t come up with an explanation.
“Oh, I get it,” the teen smirked with recognition. Then he laughed, not so much at Charlie, as at the roller coaster of emotions he was speeding through. It was reasonable to guess that he too had been there before.
“What year is it?” Charlie stammered out, surprised by the higher pitch of his own voice.
“What year is it outside? Or what year is it in here?” Then the teen winked mischievously and headed back towards the snack bar to serve up another slice of pizza to another eager kid… Leaving Charlie to figure out what the heck was happening on his own.
It was only then when he realized that all of the other people scattered around the arcade were teenagers as well. Some of them were a little older. Some of them were a little younger. But they were all living it up, pounding away on games, scarfing down greasy pizza, or just jamming to the music.
“Holy shit…” he mumbled under his breath. An expression of dumbfounded disbelief gradually spread across his face as he looked around the arcade. Crash! Charlie’s head instinctively snapped around, and his eyes widened as he saw several cosmic bowling lanes in all of their black-light-neon-colored glory. Blurs of green, purple, red, and orange flew down the lanes and sent the pins flying as teens bowled, laughed, and downed their sugary beverages.
Stepping closer, he couldn’t help overhearing some of their conversations… And they certainly weren’t those of teens in the ‘90s. “I’m telling you, Vanguard ETFs are the way to go…” insisted a dweeby kid in glasses to two gothed out young ladies. “My husband is so freaking lazy. I swear all he does is sit around streaming episodes of The Office all day…” complained a cheerleader-type in lots of makeup. “Oh shit, what time is it?! I’m supposed to grab the kids from school for their dentist appointments!” exclaimed a chubby kid in a Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirt. The contrast of what Charlie’s eyes saw to what his ears heard was almost too much for his mind to comprehend.
But then his attention was drawn to a blizzard of white lights swirling out of a nearby doorway. He stepped through it and emerged into an enormous space lined from one end to the other with hardwood. It was a roller-skating rink lit up by numerous disco balls, glitter-bombing their magical speckles of light all over the place. Numerous teens skated around the ring, bobbing and weaving to “Ice Ice Baby.”
A brunette with crimped hair and bell bottoms skated past him, aiming a honkin’ VHS camcorder towards his jaw-dropped face.
“Hey, I know that look! We’ve got ourselves a virgin here!” She yelled over her shoulder to her friends as she skated circles around him.
“What?” he stammered out. “What is this place?”
“Welcome to the Warp Zone, new guy.” She smiled at him as she skated off.
But as Charlie watched the throng of teens skate round and round, the inexplicable place became too much for his mind to process. He turned and ran back the way he had come, away from the skating rink, past the bowling lanes, through the arcade, and out the door. He shielded his eyes as the sunlight blinded him, stumbling back towards his rusted-out county inspector’s pickup as his frumpy adult self. He examined his hands — chubby and hairy once again. He looked down at his stomach — just as rotund as it usually was. He felt the contours of his face — covered with the familiar stubble. He leaned against the side of the truck, trying to find reason in what the heck he had just experienced.
“Hey man, you alright?”
Charlie looked over to see a couple people approaching him with expressions of concern, led by a guy in the blandest community banker’s suit he had ever seen. In fact, they all looked like plain and boring adults like he passed by in the grocery store without giving a second thought. But there they were, out in the middle of nowhere, outside of what looked like an abandoned building like so many others he had spent his whole adult life condemning.
“Am I going crazy?” Charlie sputtered breathlessly.
They exchanged glances… Then smiles spread across their faces.
“Only if you stay out here,” one of them replied. And with that, they approached the same door Charlie had just come out. As the door opened, sounds of the Stone Temple Pilots and arcade games emanated from within, accented by vibrant colored lights beckoning like tractor beams.
“You comin’ or what?” the guy in the bland suit asked, showing more excitement than any banker could ever possibly feel.
Charlie slowly stood up straight, a sparkle of childlike wonder filling his eyes. It was a glimmer of possibility… Of hope. A smile gradually grew, spreading from ear to ear. It was the first time he had smiled with genuine happiness in years. And with that, he walked towards the door and stepped inside, the Warp Zone within engulfing him as the door swung shut behind him.
It turned out the banker’s name was Blake, and he was in a funk from his high school sweetheart divorcing him. On the outside, he dealt with it by eating low sodium microwave dinners (his doctor lectured him to watch his cholesterol) and binge watching Saved By The Bell. But in the Warp Zone, he was a hip kid who won lip sync battles performing Guns N’ Roses songs and could eat as much cheese pizza as he wanted. Charlie bonded with him smashing buttons on Killer Instinct, though in close matches, Charlie always managed to connect his ultra combo to take the win.
Charlie found that making friends was easy in the Warp Zone. In fact, it was as easy as it had been for him back in middle school. In no time at all, he’d fallen into a group that included a plumber who had set the record for rushing touchdowns in high school, a language arts teacher who had starred in her community college’s spring musical, and an accountant whose old band had opened for a band that had opened for Metallica. They played video games, bowled, and roller skated into the wee hours of morning. Or at least, Charlie assumed it was morning — there were no windows and no one had bothered putting up a clock. Every time he felt a twinge of responsibility, that he should probably get going so he wasn’t late for work, he decided to stay just a little bit longer. He could be a zombie and still do his job just fine. So he scarfed down more pizza, more hot dogs, more popcorn, and more Sour Patch Kids. But he was most impressed by the fact that no matter what he ate, there were absolutely no gastro-intestinal ramifications.
Eventually Charlie’s sugar high turned into the inevitable sugar crash. He could go home and get a little sleep, he reasoned, but… He really didn’t want to leave. That was when Blake told him about the storage room lined with sleeping bags. Some people just dropped in and out when they could, while others took a quick zonk in back so they could get right back to the fun as soon as possible. Charlie decided to go with the second option. His head hit the pillow, and a few hours later, he snapped awake, reenergized to rejoin his friends for a table hockey tournament and a game of laser tag.
It turned out that quite a few teens lived in the Warp Zone, and one fateful night (or it could have been during the day for all they knew), Charlie decided that he didn’t have any real reason to go back outside either. He was tired of dealing with taxes, and rent payments, and climate change… While inside the Warp Zone, everything felt right again. Everything felt perfect, actually. And no matter how much pizza he ate or soda he drank, he still felt great. Quite simply, it was the life that he had always dreamed of living.
Eventually, he hit it off with the VHS camcorder girl who had smiled at him when he first found the roller-skating rink. Her name was Colleen, and she told him stories about all the crazy drunken parties she lived for when she was a teen. On the outside, she worked part-time as a hairdresser and was struggling to save enough money to go back to college. She’d been living in her younger sister’s basement for a while, but after discovering the Warp Zone, she decided there was no reason to leave. When everyone else was sleeping, Charlie and Colleen would duck off to dark corners to make out, and it felt just as invigorating to Charlie as when he first kissed Molly Chambers.
Without a doubt, Charlie Fairbanks was back in his prime…
Until a teen that Charlie was playing NBA Jam against dropped dead right next to him.
It was the fourth quarter, and Charlie had just pulled off a Karl Malone three-sixty dunk to retake the lead with only forty-seven seconds left on the clock. That was when the kid clutched his chest and dropped to the floor. Charlie’s first thought was that the kid was just being overdramatic, so he stole the ball from his guy and went down to score with another dunk. But as the kid lay there on the ground, Charlie realized that he wasn’t breathing. Charlie frantically called for help, but no one else was the least bit alarmed. “It was just his time, man,” Blake explained with a somber shake of his head.
Everyone in the Warp Zone stepped away from their games and gathered in a circle around the deceased teen. The few who knew him shared a few words. They called him Skeeter, he loved pinball, and he’d once eaten ten hot dogs straight on a dare. But as Charlie listened to the others pay their respects, he realized that no one knew if the kid had a family on the outside, or a job, or even what his real name was. But the most disconcerting part was that the whole ordeal felt routine. The casualness with which the others spoke made it seem like falling over dead in the middle of an NBA Jam session happened all the time.
That fact was punctuated by everyone immediately drawing straws the moment the remarks concluded. Much to his chagrin, Charlie drew the shortest, meaning it was his job to deliver Skeeter’s body to the mortuary.
“Just drop him off and hurry right back,” Blake encouraged him, “You owe me a rematch on Killer Instinct.” “Promise me you’ll come back,” Colleen urged as she gave him a kiss on the cheek, like the act of coming back was a bigger deal than the kid who had dropped dead. But he assured her he would be right back anyway. Then Charlie hoisted the dead boy in his arms — which wasn’t any trouble since he was rather fit — and he headed towards the door that he hadn’t stepped through in who knew how long. Someone cued up The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” and it played as everyone stood in stoic silence, watching Charlie carry the boy out.
The moment Charlie stepped outside, his eyes instinctively pressed closed, blinded by the blazing sunlight. The weight of the boy in his arms was suddenly embarrassingly heavy. He struggled to open his eyes as they gradually adjusted to the bright light. Then, as the world came into view around him, he realized that he was no longer holding a boy, but a withered, old man! Charlie was so unnerved that he bobbled and nearly dropped the shriveled, gangly, husk of a person in his nineties. But thankfully, he held onto his recently deceased challenger, and hefted him over to his dirty county truck. The passenger door was just as squeaky as it had always been, and he gently laid the old boy down in the passenger seat. Then after a moment’s consideration, Charlie strapped a seatbelt around him for safety. He didn’t want the county to be liable.
His truck had an even harder time starting up than usual. Thankfully he was parked on an incline and was able to get it rolling so he could pop the clutch to turn it over. Unfortunately, the windshield wipers were no match for the layers upon layers of grime that had built up, so Charlie begrudgingly pulled a rag out of the back to wipe off the windows. But as he scrubbed enough grime off to reveal the glass, he froze, not recognizing the man who was staring back in the reflection.
Charlie’s hair had turned an ashen gray, wrinkles had spread across his face, and his gut had expanded to double its previous size. He stared at the impossible image, not knowing whether to scream or cry. Eventually, he did neither and just climbed into the truck. The problem was, there wasn’t anything easy about it. His knees were weak. His back hurt. And he could barely wrap his fingers around the steering wheel because of arthritic pain. He suddenly understood why the others had drawn straws for the task. He wanted to get to the mortuary and back as fast as he could.
But it turned out that the world around him was completely unfamiliar. All of the cars on the road were sleek, aerodynamic, and most notably, entirely silent. Charlie had seen an electric car here or there on occasion in the past, but now they were the only cars on the road. He drove past several lots where he had condemned buildings in the past, but all of them had been replaced by eco-friendly structures that touted ample greenspace and sophisticated solar power arrays, looking more like science fiction than science fact. Pedestrians walked treelined paths with holograms projected in front of their eyes from over-ear headsets, immersed in whatever conversations or content in which they were partaking. And there was barely any traffic on the road, as it seemed most people were getting around on bikes or on foot.
Fortunately, the mortuary was right where it had been in the past, with a lush green lawn and somber brick walls that hadn’t changed in the slightest in however much time had passed. Charlie lugged the old man’s body towards the door, but hesitated, unable to stomach the thought of going inside and explaining himself… So he just gently laid the old man formerly known as Skeeter on a nearby bench. Then he stepped back, questioning if the move was proper… But he had no desire to stick around to find out, running back to his truck — or at least, his mind told his body to run, but his body frantically objected with pain in the knees and gasping breaths, resulting in more of a hurried hobble.
Desperate to find stable footing in the world, Charlie drove towards his apartment, drawing stares the whole way in his chugging, pollution-pipe of a truck. But his jaw dropped upon reaching his destination. The sagging building with its faded paint that he used to call home had been replaced by ultra-modern live-work lofts, with a Japanese river garden weaving through the center of the complex. He couldn’t bear the thought of looking around, so he drove towards Divots, his old watering hole. But as he pulled into the parking lot, he saw that the place where he had passed so many evenings reminiscing was boarded up and abandoned, with an apropos “Condemned!” sticker on the plywood covering the front door.
For a few minutes, all Charlie could do was stare at it in disbelief. But then an idea popped into his head. He didn’t particularly like it, but his curiosity soon got the better of him… He walked up to a teen who was chatting on his holographic headset with projections of his friends, and asked for his help. He explained that his phone… Headset… Device… Thingy had broken, and he couldn’t reach his family. Remarkably, the kid was extremely helpful, using his “comm” to try and locate the contact info of Charlie’s dad and sister. Unfortunately, both of their names were too common for quick hits, but Falcon, on the other hand, still happened to be a unique name.
At first, Charlie’s nephew didn’t actually believe that his uncle was alive, but once he saw Charlie’s face, he wrapped him up in a huge hug. And that was no small matter, because Falcon was no longer a boy anymore. Charlie was staggered to be embraced by a man who was nearly forty-years-old — practically the same age Charlie had been when he first entered the Warp Zone. Falcon explained that Charlie had been missing for so long that everyone assumed he was dead. They had even organized a touching memorial service for him more than two decades before where they had played Live’s “Lightning Crashes,” along with a number of Charlie’s other favorite songs.
When asked where he had been, Charlie couldn’t come up with an answer that made any sense… So he changed the subject to the one thing he knew Falcon loved more than anything else: TikTok. But an awkward silence lingered, highlighting how behind the times Charlie had become. Falcon explained that TikTok had ceased being cool and had shut down years ago. And even if it hadn’t been, he didn’t have time for empty time-sucks between his wife, three kids, job, and modifying their classic Victorian house into a modern fully-sustainable home. When Charlie asked about his sister, Falcon replied that she was on silent retreat for a few months high in the Himalayas after cashing out all of her stock options. He said it so casually it sounded like it was what everyone did. On a more somber front, he explained that Charlie’s father had passed away nearly twenty-five years before. He had been so grief stricken over Charlie’s disappearance that his heart just couldn’t take it. It didn’t make any sense to Charlie, given what his relationship with his father had been like in adulthood, and suddenly he wondered if there was something about it that he had been missing all along. At the very least, he felt guilty about not getting to say goodbye.
But Falcon wanted to know everything about where Charlie had been and what he had been doing for so many years. He wanted him to come back to his house and meet his family. He wanted him to stick around for a while so that he could become reacquainted with his only uncle. And that was when Charlie realized why everyone else had told him to hurry right back to the Warp Zone. He had no idea how he would explain the life he had chosen to live to his nephew, and that filled him with something he hadn’t felt in a long time… Shame. But rather than admit it, Charlie started stammering out excuses. He had someplace to be. He was very late. He couldn’t miss it. But before he could leave, Falcon pulled out a dilapidated, dust-covered box of Charlie’s things that he had been holding onto ever since Charlie’s disappearance. He handed it to Charlie before the old man hobbled away, leaving his nephew standing there to wonder just what had caused his Uncle Charlie to leave just as soon as he had come back.
Charlie didn’t make it far down the road before he pulled over to the shoulder and opened the box. It was filled with a number of his most meaningful possessions from his apartment — his Nirvana and Pearl Jam posters, his Nintendo, and his eighth grade yearbook. As he paged through it, tears welled up in Charlie’s eyes. It had never occurred to him that while he was busy setting Street Fighter II records with Blake and roller skating with Colleen, that time was ticking forward at a rapid pace in the outside world… And even more startling, he was being left further and further behind. He didn’t even know how old he was anymore.
But perhaps it’s not too late, he thought, gazing out the windshield at the road ahead. Perhaps he could still catch up. Maybe he could find a job that meant something to him. Maybe he could save up some money to visit his sister in the Himalayas. In the meantime, he could even look up his old childhood pals and have a reunion. They could share a pizza and tag team Super Mario Bros 3, just like old times, even if only for a couple hours.
But the more Charlie thought about all of the things he could do, the more he was overwhelmed by a sense of dread. It could have just been dusk turning to night, but the road ahead suddenly looked dark and daunting to his tired eyes. His back hurt from sitting in the uncomfortable old truck for so long. His fingers were stiff from turning the pages of his old yearbook. And he just wasn’t sure who would hire an old guy like him for a meaningful job… Not that he had the slightest idea what a meaningful job would even be.
And just like that, Charlie turned the truck around and drove back to the Warp Zone. The moment he walked through the door, he was back to his old self — or rather, his young self. Colleen planted a big kiss on his cheek. He gobbled up three slices of pepperoni pizza, downed two Mountain Dews, and felt great again, spirits lifted to the peak of his sugar high. Blake waved him over to the Killer Instinct machine as a crowd of teens gathered to watch the head-to-head match play out, with Colleen leaning on his shoulder to lead his cheering squad. Without a doubt, Charlie Fairbanks was where he belonged.
Later that night (or it could have been the next day for all he knew), long after Charlie had beaten Blake in their best of twenty-one series, and skated around the rink a hundred times holding Colleen’s hand, he found his thoughts wandering back to the outside world that had changed so much without him even realizing it…
He reasoned that one day, he would step back out of the Warp Zone again…
One day, he would explain everything to his nephew…
One day, he would go see his sister…
One day, he would reunite with his old friends…
One day, he would visit his father’s grave…
One day…
One day…
In eighth grade, Charlie Fairbanks was having the time of his life. While the other students were fighting acne or picking food out of their braces, Charlie was at his physical peak. In the fall, he was captain of the cross-country team and set a record for the fastest mile run in Rolling Ridge Middle School history. In the winter, he was the princely star of Sleeping Beauty and got to kiss Molly Chambers to wake her up in all four performances. In the spring, he won first place in the Super Mario Bros 3 all-night fundraising marathon for the local orphanage. On weekends and over the summer, Charlie and his friends (and he had many friends), spent countless hours at the arcade, where Charlie set even more records. He was the local champion of Street Fighter II and NBA Jam, of which he had locked in all ten high score slots with the initials CF1. His initials also made a showing at least once or twice in the top ten of every other game he tried his hand at. And when he wasn’t racking up scores, he was making out with Molly Chambers, who had fallen in love with him ever since being kissed awake on stage.
Without a doubt, Charlie Fairbanks was in his prime.
Though as is the nature with growing up, eighth grade turned into ninth grade… And in high school, the boy who had once been the fastest, the most talented, and the most attractive, became the average-est, the medium-est, and the most acned. Molly Chambers dumped him on the eve of the Homecoming dance to go with a senior instead. He found himself relegated to the junior varsity cross-country team and was cast as Townsperson Number Five in Romeo & Juliet. His once reliable group of friends began to drift away, trading in arcade weekends for other more mature interests, like cars, concerts, and, on rare occasion, contraceptives. Charlie had largely ignored schoolwork during his middle school glory, and he suddenly discovered that he was painfully behind in every subject. In fact, time seemed to move faster with each passing year, and the boy who was once at the front of the pack found himself trailing in every single rat race.
The only place that Charlie’s eighth grade glory lived on was in his well-worn 1995 yearbook. It was positioned prominently on his bookshelf. He fondly remembered those days every time he sat down, picked it up, and flipped through its pages…
No matter that he was sitting on the toilet, under a buzzing compact fluorescent lightbulb, in the cramped bathroom of his dumpy one-bedroom apartment. It was the closest to a throne that he had achieved in his thirty-eight years. Charlie’s evenings were no longer filled with cross-country blue ribbons, or standing ovations after his latest performance, or all-night gaming marathons with his pals. And as nice as it would have been to spend all evening sitting on the toilet reminiscing about such things, it just wasn’t possible — Charlie had sensitive skin, after all — so he spent most of his time sitting on his frumpy couch with a video game controller in his hand. Though it wasn’t an ergonomically designed controller with vibration motors and buttons galore. Rather, it was a controller for his Nintendo Entertainment System — one of the original consoles, mind you, not one of the crappy modern miniature ones (having to blow into the cartridges to make the games work was part of the charm). The only problem was that even though his mind knew all of the secrets and shortcuts through Super Mario Bros 3 (not that he ever actually used a warp whistle), his thumbs just weren’t as nimble as they used to be. If it wasn’t the darn bouncing octopuses in World 3-5 that ended his run, it was the absurd flying spiky turtle thrower in World 5-8. And if they weren’t a problem that day, it was the impossible to predict piranha plants in World 7-7 or the darn ghosts in one of the many castles that got him.
Every time the tragic “Game Over” ballad played, he wouldn’t react with anger or sadness. He wouldn’t throw his controller (it was far too valuable for that) or let out a yell of frustration. Rather, he would just sit there and absorb it in silence. Inevitably, his eyes would wander around his living room, taking in the posters for Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and The Smashing Pumpkins. It wasn’t that Charlie was a purest to one era or anything so simple minded as that… It was just that, in his opinion, there hadn’t been anything truly worthy since then.
When he was playing Nintendo or listening to his Nirvana CDs, Charlie found that he could still feel glimmering echoes of the joy he had felt in his youth. But when he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, reality stared right back. Sometimes, he hardly recognized the reflection of a man sliding precariously towards middle age. His round frame was flabby around the edges, and somehow, he always looked a little bit scruffy, even just a few minutes after shaving. Inevitably, he would find himself gazing deep into his eyes, studying the man who was once a gregarious leader with his whole life ahead of him… But that boy was long gone. Though what that boy had been replaced with wasn’t sadness… Or hopelessness… Or any of the other dreadful words ending in -ness for that matter… Charlie Fairbanks was just… Empty.
He was as empty as the abandoned buildings he traipsed through day in and day out. Bolt cutters were the most common tool of his trade, which he used to cut rusted Master Locks off of rusted doors. Then with loud screeches of disapproval, he would swing the doors open, swipe aside the curtain of cobwebs, and step into the decrepit, forgotten spaces that were his responsibility to inspect. Most were adorned with more rat poop and cockroaches than any normal person would see in a lifetime. After filling in all of the blanks and signing the bottom of his paperwork, Charlie would slap a “Condemned!” sticker on every door in sight. Then he would dust off his building inspector jacket and traipse back to his county pickup truck that was nearly as rusty as most of the locks that he cut. There, he ate his turkey sandwich, munched his Funyuns, washed them down with his Wild Cherry Pepsi, and topped it off with a pair of Hostess Cupcakes.
It wasn’t that he was alone in the world, per se… He just didn’t have a place in it anymore. His old friends had all moved to different parts of the country, and their formerly substantive conversations had all degenerated into text messages on each other’s birthdays and the occasional “Like” on posts. Every month or so, he’d babysit his twelve-year-old nephew, Falcon. Charlie had no idea why his sister named her son after a bird of prey, but given that she was a respected social media manager with a swank condo in the city, who was Charlie to judge. He valiantly tried to teach his nephew the joys of Nintendo and Pearl Jam, but Falcon’s only interests were watching TikToks and sending Snaps to his friends. On Sundays, Charlie would have dinner with his dad, chewing quietly as his divorced old man lambasted him to “get off his ass” or “go get married.” Friday nights were Charlie’s only reprieve, when he frequented a local dive bar named Divots — the same bar he’d been going to since he was old enough to pass for 21. There, he reminisced about the good ol’ days with other townies who had stuck around. Molly Chambers stopped by one night when she was visiting for the holidays, only for Charlie to learn that she was married with two kids and living in a six-bedroom house in the suburbs of Chicago. She was a doctor at the children’s hospital and her husband was a photographer for National Geographic. Charlie did his best to pretend to be interested while Molly swiped through her husband’s photos of critically endangered Ganges River Dolphins in the freshwaters of Nepal, but all the while, Charlie was busy dying inside. As he lay on his creaky bed that night, he found that he couldn’t sleep a wink, his mind racing, trying to pinpoint the moment when his life had gone so horribly wrong.
But little did he know that in a few short hours, his life would forever change…
It was a day that started out like any other. His alarm went off at the usual time. His rusty county truck had the usual trouble starting after a cold night. And there wasn’t a single task on his schedule to look forward to besides chowing down on his Funyuns and cupcakes. He pulled up to his first stop of the day with the same lack of enthusiasm — really a lack of anything — that he brought to every day of work. It was a warehouse that some eager business owner had chosen to paint white once upon a time, but that pristine color had long since melted away into a sad combination of rust red and dirt brown tears. The place was on its last legs. Charlie picked up his clipboard in one hand and his bolt cutters in the other, and trudged towards the metal door shielding the cobwebs and rat poop from the world. As he hefted his bolt cutters towards the rusty lock, he suddenly realized… There was a Master Lock on the door… But this one was new and shiny… And moreover, it was hanging open.
That’s odd… he thought to himself.
Charlie glanced around, put off balance by the unexpected development. That was when he noticed there were at least two dozen cars parked nearby. They were all covered in layers of dust, like they had been parked there for some time. It wasn’t particularly unusual for Charlie to see a junker or two abandoned outside of one of the buildings he inspected and condemned, but to see so many cars was extremely unusual.
Charlie set down his bolt cutters in the back of his pickup before pulling out his phone to double check the address. Sure enough, he was in the right place, with the correct numbers just barely visible in faded black paint on the wall. With one more glance this way and that, Charlie cautiously approached the building’s door. He reached out, grabbed the handle, and gave it an aggressive yank —
The door swung open with the silent ease of brand-new hinges bathed in WD-40.
Then Charlie gasped, pushing the door closed just as fast as he had opened it. He could’ve sworn he heard music inside. But that couldn’t be. Perhaps he was hearing things after getting so little sleep. Certain he was mistaken, he took a steadying breath and gently pulled the door open once again.
But he wasn’t delirious, because his ears were greeted by the reverberating bass line and twangy guitar of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” His nose took in the wafting scent of fresh pizza, baked pretzels, and cotton candy. And his eyes fell upon the most unbelievable sight… It was something he hadn’t seen in more than two decades…
It was an arcade straight out of the 1990s. It was an arcade of his youth. The games were those that he had grown up playing — Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Turtles in Time, Tekken, Cruis’n USA, and most importantly, NBA Jam — along with all of their flashing lights and alluring synth soundtracks that they blared out into the world. Vibrant pools of red, blue, and green light cycled on and off with the beat of the music, cutting through the party smoke in the air.
Only this wasn’t some new-age bar that tried to capture the nostalgia of old. No… This place radiated genuine authenticity. It felt like the arcade that he had spent so much time at in his youth. It even smelled like it.
“What in the world…” he wondered aloud, though no one could hear him over the cacophony of sound. His body was unable to resist the magnetism of it, and he crossed the threshold, stepping inside.
His all-too-modern instincts pulled his eyes down to the phone in his hand where the address had been listed a moment before. But his phone was gone, as if it had vanished into thin air. Though that wasn’t what startled Charlie the most… It was his hand. He raised it up to his eyes, studying it in the dim light bouncing around the arcade.
His hand looked… Younger. It was no longer chubby with dark hair on his knuckles. All of the scratches and scars that had built up after so many years of spelunking through crawl spaces and attics were gone as well.
His entire body felt good too… So much better than it had in years. He realized that his gut wasn’t sticking out. He could actually see his belt buckle… And his pants were so loose they were practically falling off his hips… Which suddenly made Charlie reach his hands up to feel his face. He was startled to discover that his skin was smooth, his cheeks weren’t nearly as round, and there wasn’t a hint of stubble anymore.
He rushed towards the nearby prize counter, outfitted with flashing lights and bling galore. But he was focused on the mirrors behind all of the colorful prizes. It was there that he saw the most unbelievable thing he had seen in his entire life.
In the reflection, he saw the spitting image of the boy from his eighth grade yearbook. The person staring back at him was thirteen-year-old Charlie. He was still wearing his building inspector’s uniform that he put on every morning. It was just oversized and baggy on his skinny frame. Charlie’s mouth hung open, trying to make sense of the impossible sight, but he didn’t have time to figure it out before he heard someone say —
“How many tickets you got, home skillet?” It was a teenager who was a couple years older than him in an MTV t-shirt walking down from the snack bar.
But Charlie just stared back at him with his thirteen-year-old jaw hanging open. His brain was working harder than it had in ages, and it still couldn’t come up with an explanation.
“Oh, I get it,” the teen smirked with recognition. Then he laughed, not so much at Charlie, as at the roller coaster of emotions he was speeding through. It was reasonable to guess that he too had been there before.
“What year is it?” Charlie stammered out, surprised by the higher pitch of his own voice.
“What year is it outside? Or what year is it in here?” Then the teen winked mischievously and headed back towards the snack bar to serve up another slice of pizza to another eager kid… Leaving Charlie to figure out what the heck was happening on his own.
It was only then when he realized that all of the other people scattered around the arcade were teenagers as well. Some of them were a little older. Some of them were a little younger. But they were all living it up, pounding away on games, scarfing down greasy pizza, or just jamming to the music.
“Holy shit…” he mumbled under his breath. An expression of dumbfounded disbelief gradually spread across his face as he looked around the arcade. Crash! Charlie’s head instinctively snapped around, and his eyes widened as he saw several cosmic bowling lanes in all of their black-light-neon-colored glory. Blurs of green, purple, red, and orange flew down the lanes and sent the pins flying as teens bowled, laughed, and downed their sugary beverages.
Stepping closer, he couldn’t help overhearing some of their conversations… And they certainly weren’t those of teens in the ‘90s. “I’m telling you, Vanguard ETFs are the way to go…” insisted a dweeby kid in glasses to two gothed out young ladies. “My husband is so freaking lazy. I swear all he does is sit around streaming episodes of The Office all day…” complained a cheerleader-type in lots of makeup. “Oh shit, what time is it?! I’m supposed to grab the kids from school for their dentist appointments!” exclaimed a chubby kid in a Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirt. The contrast of what Charlie’s eyes saw to what his ears heard was almost too much for his mind to comprehend.
But then his attention was drawn to a blizzard of white lights swirling out of a nearby doorway. He stepped through it and emerged into an enormous space lined from one end to the other with hardwood. It was a roller-skating rink lit up by numerous disco balls, glitter-bombing their magical speckles of light all over the place. Numerous teens skated around the ring, bobbing and weaving to “Ice Ice Baby.”
A brunette with crimped hair and bell bottoms skated past him, aiming a honkin’ VHS camcorder towards his jaw-dropped face.
“Hey, I know that look! We’ve got ourselves a virgin here!” She yelled over her shoulder to her friends as she skated circles around him.
“What?” he stammered out. “What is this place?”
“Welcome to the Warp Zone, new guy.” She smiled at him as she skated off.
But as Charlie watched the throng of teens skate round and round, the inexplicable place became too much for his mind to process. He turned and ran back the way he had come, away from the skating rink, past the bowling lanes, through the arcade, and out the door. He shielded his eyes as the sunlight blinded him, stumbling back towards his rusted-out county inspector’s pickup as his frumpy adult self. He examined his hands — chubby and hairy once again. He looked down at his stomach — just as rotund as it usually was. He felt the contours of his face — covered with the familiar stubble. He leaned against the side of the truck, trying to find reason in what the heck he had just experienced.
“Hey man, you alright?”
Charlie looked over to see a couple people approaching him with expressions of concern, led by a guy in the blandest community banker’s suit he had ever seen. In fact, they all looked like plain and boring adults like he passed by in the grocery store without giving a second thought. But there they were, out in the middle of nowhere, outside of what looked like an abandoned building like so many others he had spent his whole adult life condemning.
“Am I going crazy?” Charlie sputtered breathlessly.
They exchanged glances… Then smiles spread across their faces.
“Only if you stay out here,” one of them replied. And with that, they approached the same door Charlie had just come out. As the door opened, sounds of the Stone Temple Pilots and arcade games emanated from within, accented by vibrant colored lights beckoning like tractor beams.
“You comin’ or what?” the guy in the bland suit asked, showing more excitement than any banker could ever possibly feel.
Charlie slowly stood up straight, a sparkle of childlike wonder filling his eyes. It was a glimmer of possibility… Of hope. A smile gradually grew, spreading from ear to ear. It was the first time he had smiled with genuine happiness in years. And with that, he walked towards the door and stepped inside, the Warp Zone within engulfing him as the door swung shut behind him.
It turned out the banker’s name was Blake, and he was in a funk from his high school sweetheart divorcing him. On the outside, he dealt with it by eating low sodium microwave dinners (his doctor lectured him to watch his cholesterol) and binge watching Saved By The Bell. But in the Warp Zone, he was a hip kid who won lip sync battles performing Guns N’ Roses songs and could eat as much cheese pizza as he wanted. Charlie bonded with him smashing buttons on Killer Instinct, though in close matches, Charlie always managed to connect his ultra combo to take the win.
Charlie found that making friends was easy in the Warp Zone. In fact, it was as easy as it had been for him back in middle school. In no time at all, he’d fallen into a group that included a plumber who had set the record for rushing touchdowns in high school, a language arts teacher who had starred in her community college’s spring musical, and an accountant whose old band had opened for a band that had opened for Metallica. They played video games, bowled, and roller skated into the wee hours of morning. Or at least, Charlie assumed it was morning — there were no windows and no one had bothered putting up a clock. Every time he felt a twinge of responsibility, that he should probably get going so he wasn’t late for work, he decided to stay just a little bit longer. He could be a zombie and still do his job just fine. So he scarfed down more pizza, more hot dogs, more popcorn, and more Sour Patch Kids. But he was most impressed by the fact that no matter what he ate, there were absolutely no gastro-intestinal ramifications.
Eventually Charlie’s sugar high turned into the inevitable sugar crash. He could go home and get a little sleep, he reasoned, but… He really didn’t want to leave. That was when Blake told him about the storage room lined with sleeping bags. Some people just dropped in and out when they could, while others took a quick zonk in back so they could get right back to the fun as soon as possible. Charlie decided to go with the second option. His head hit the pillow, and a few hours later, he snapped awake, reenergized to rejoin his friends for a table hockey tournament and a game of laser tag.
It turned out that quite a few teens lived in the Warp Zone, and one fateful night (or it could have been during the day for all they knew), Charlie decided that he didn’t have any real reason to go back outside either. He was tired of dealing with taxes, and rent payments, and climate change… While inside the Warp Zone, everything felt right again. Everything felt perfect, actually. And no matter how much pizza he ate or soda he drank, he still felt great. Quite simply, it was the life that he had always dreamed of living.
Eventually, he hit it off with the VHS camcorder girl who had smiled at him when he first found the roller-skating rink. Her name was Colleen, and she told him stories about all the crazy drunken parties she lived for when she was a teen. On the outside, she worked part-time as a hairdresser and was struggling to save enough money to go back to college. She’d been living in her younger sister’s basement for a while, but after discovering the Warp Zone, she decided there was no reason to leave. When everyone else was sleeping, Charlie and Colleen would duck off to dark corners to make out, and it felt just as invigorating to Charlie as when he first kissed Molly Chambers.
Without a doubt, Charlie Fairbanks was back in his prime…
Until a teen that Charlie was playing NBA Jam against dropped dead right next to him.
It was the fourth quarter, and Charlie had just pulled off a Karl Malone three-sixty dunk to retake the lead with only forty-seven seconds left on the clock. That was when the kid clutched his chest and dropped to the floor. Charlie’s first thought was that the kid was just being overdramatic, so he stole the ball from his guy and went down to score with another dunk. But as the kid lay there on the ground, Charlie realized that he wasn’t breathing. Charlie frantically called for help, but no one else was the least bit alarmed. “It was just his time, man,” Blake explained with a somber shake of his head.
Everyone in the Warp Zone stepped away from their games and gathered in a circle around the deceased teen. The few who knew him shared a few words. They called him Skeeter, he loved pinball, and he’d once eaten ten hot dogs straight on a dare. But as Charlie listened to the others pay their respects, he realized that no one knew if the kid had a family on the outside, or a job, or even what his real name was. But the most disconcerting part was that the whole ordeal felt routine. The casualness with which the others spoke made it seem like falling over dead in the middle of an NBA Jam session happened all the time.
That fact was punctuated by everyone immediately drawing straws the moment the remarks concluded. Much to his chagrin, Charlie drew the shortest, meaning it was his job to deliver Skeeter’s body to the mortuary.
“Just drop him off and hurry right back,” Blake encouraged him, “You owe me a rematch on Killer Instinct.” “Promise me you’ll come back,” Colleen urged as she gave him a kiss on the cheek, like the act of coming back was a bigger deal than the kid who had dropped dead. But he assured her he would be right back anyway. Then Charlie hoisted the dead boy in his arms — which wasn’t any trouble since he was rather fit — and he headed towards the door that he hadn’t stepped through in who knew how long. Someone cued up The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” and it played as everyone stood in stoic silence, watching Charlie carry the boy out.
The moment Charlie stepped outside, his eyes instinctively pressed closed, blinded by the blazing sunlight. The weight of the boy in his arms was suddenly embarrassingly heavy. He struggled to open his eyes as they gradually adjusted to the bright light. Then, as the world came into view around him, he realized that he was no longer holding a boy, but a withered, old man! Charlie was so unnerved that he bobbled and nearly dropped the shriveled, gangly, husk of a person in his nineties. But thankfully, he held onto his recently deceased challenger, and hefted him over to his dirty county truck. The passenger door was just as squeaky as it had always been, and he gently laid the old boy down in the passenger seat. Then after a moment’s consideration, Charlie strapped a seatbelt around him for safety. He didn’t want the county to be liable.
His truck had an even harder time starting up than usual. Thankfully he was parked on an incline and was able to get it rolling so he could pop the clutch to turn it over. Unfortunately, the windshield wipers were no match for the layers upon layers of grime that had built up, so Charlie begrudgingly pulled a rag out of the back to wipe off the windows. But as he scrubbed enough grime off to reveal the glass, he froze, not recognizing the man who was staring back in the reflection.
Charlie’s hair had turned an ashen gray, wrinkles had spread across his face, and his gut had expanded to double its previous size. He stared at the impossible image, not knowing whether to scream or cry. Eventually, he did neither and just climbed into the truck. The problem was, there wasn’t anything easy about it. His knees were weak. His back hurt. And he could barely wrap his fingers around the steering wheel because of arthritic pain. He suddenly understood why the others had drawn straws for the task. He wanted to get to the mortuary and back as fast as he could.
But it turned out that the world around him was completely unfamiliar. All of the cars on the road were sleek, aerodynamic, and most notably, entirely silent. Charlie had seen an electric car here or there on occasion in the past, but now they were the only cars on the road. He drove past several lots where he had condemned buildings in the past, but all of them had been replaced by eco-friendly structures that touted ample greenspace and sophisticated solar power arrays, looking more like science fiction than science fact. Pedestrians walked treelined paths with holograms projected in front of their eyes from over-ear headsets, immersed in whatever conversations or content in which they were partaking. And there was barely any traffic on the road, as it seemed most people were getting around on bikes or on foot.
Fortunately, the mortuary was right where it had been in the past, with a lush green lawn and somber brick walls that hadn’t changed in the slightest in however much time had passed. Charlie lugged the old man’s body towards the door, but hesitated, unable to stomach the thought of going inside and explaining himself… So he just gently laid the old man formerly known as Skeeter on a nearby bench. Then he stepped back, questioning if the move was proper… But he had no desire to stick around to find out, running back to his truck — or at least, his mind told his body to run, but his body frantically objected with pain in the knees and gasping breaths, resulting in more of a hurried hobble.
Desperate to find stable footing in the world, Charlie drove towards his apartment, drawing stares the whole way in his chugging, pollution-pipe of a truck. But his jaw dropped upon reaching his destination. The sagging building with its faded paint that he used to call home had been replaced by ultra-modern live-work lofts, with a Japanese river garden weaving through the center of the complex. He couldn’t bear the thought of looking around, so he drove towards Divots, his old watering hole. But as he pulled into the parking lot, he saw that the place where he had passed so many evenings reminiscing was boarded up and abandoned, with an apropos “Condemned!” sticker on the plywood covering the front door.
For a few minutes, all Charlie could do was stare at it in disbelief. But then an idea popped into his head. He didn’t particularly like it, but his curiosity soon got the better of him… He walked up to a teen who was chatting on his holographic headset with projections of his friends, and asked for his help. He explained that his phone… Headset… Device… Thingy had broken, and he couldn’t reach his family. Remarkably, the kid was extremely helpful, using his “comm” to try and locate the contact info of Charlie’s dad and sister. Unfortunately, both of their names were too common for quick hits, but Falcon, on the other hand, still happened to be a unique name.
At first, Charlie’s nephew didn’t actually believe that his uncle was alive, but once he saw Charlie’s face, he wrapped him up in a huge hug. And that was no small matter, because Falcon was no longer a boy anymore. Charlie was staggered to be embraced by a man who was nearly forty-years-old — practically the same age Charlie had been when he first entered the Warp Zone. Falcon explained that Charlie had been missing for so long that everyone assumed he was dead. They had even organized a touching memorial service for him more than two decades before where they had played Live’s “Lightning Crashes,” along with a number of Charlie’s other favorite songs.
When asked where he had been, Charlie couldn’t come up with an answer that made any sense… So he changed the subject to the one thing he knew Falcon loved more than anything else: TikTok. But an awkward silence lingered, highlighting how behind the times Charlie had become. Falcon explained that TikTok had ceased being cool and had shut down years ago. And even if it hadn’t been, he didn’t have time for empty time-sucks between his wife, three kids, job, and modifying their classic Victorian house into a modern fully-sustainable home. When Charlie asked about his sister, Falcon replied that she was on silent retreat for a few months high in the Himalayas after cashing out all of her stock options. He said it so casually it sounded like it was what everyone did. On a more somber front, he explained that Charlie’s father had passed away nearly twenty-five years before. He had been so grief stricken over Charlie’s disappearance that his heart just couldn’t take it. It didn’t make any sense to Charlie, given what his relationship with his father had been like in adulthood, and suddenly he wondered if there was something about it that he had been missing all along. At the very least, he felt guilty about not getting to say goodbye.
But Falcon wanted to know everything about where Charlie had been and what he had been doing for so many years. He wanted him to come back to his house and meet his family. He wanted him to stick around for a while so that he could become reacquainted with his only uncle. And that was when Charlie realized why everyone else had told him to hurry right back to the Warp Zone. He had no idea how he would explain the life he had chosen to live to his nephew, and that filled him with something he hadn’t felt in a long time… Shame. But rather than admit it, Charlie started stammering out excuses. He had someplace to be. He was very late. He couldn’t miss it. But before he could leave, Falcon pulled out a dilapidated, dust-covered box of Charlie’s things that he had been holding onto ever since Charlie’s disappearance. He handed it to Charlie before the old man hobbled away, leaving his nephew standing there to wonder just what had caused his Uncle Charlie to leave just as soon as he had come back.
Charlie didn’t make it far down the road before he pulled over to the shoulder and opened the box. It was filled with a number of his most meaningful possessions from his apartment — his Nirvana and Pearl Jam posters, his Nintendo, and his eighth grade yearbook. As he paged through it, tears welled up in Charlie’s eyes. It had never occurred to him that while he was busy setting Street Fighter II records with Blake and roller skating with Colleen, that time was ticking forward at a rapid pace in the outside world… And even more startling, he was being left further and further behind. He didn’t even know how old he was anymore.
But perhaps it’s not too late, he thought, gazing out the windshield at the road ahead. Perhaps he could still catch up. Maybe he could find a job that meant something to him. Maybe he could save up some money to visit his sister in the Himalayas. In the meantime, he could even look up his old childhood pals and have a reunion. They could share a pizza and tag team Super Mario Bros 3, just like old times, even if only for a couple hours.
But the more Charlie thought about all of the things he could do, the more he was overwhelmed by a sense of dread. It could have just been dusk turning to night, but the road ahead suddenly looked dark and daunting to his tired eyes. His back hurt from sitting in the uncomfortable old truck for so long. His fingers were stiff from turning the pages of his old yearbook. And he just wasn’t sure who would hire an old guy like him for a meaningful job… Not that he had the slightest idea what a meaningful job would even be.
And just like that, Charlie turned the truck around and drove back to the Warp Zone. The moment he walked through the door, he was back to his old self — or rather, his young self. Colleen planted a big kiss on his cheek. He gobbled up three slices of pepperoni pizza, downed two Mountain Dews, and felt great again, spirits lifted to the peak of his sugar high. Blake waved him over to the Killer Instinct machine as a crowd of teens gathered to watch the head-to-head match play out, with Colleen leaning on his shoulder to lead his cheering squad. Without a doubt, Charlie Fairbanks was where he belonged.
Later that night (or it could have been the next day for all he knew), long after Charlie had beaten Blake in their best of twenty-one series, and skated around the rink a hundred times holding Colleen’s hand, he found his thoughts wandering back to the outside world that had changed so much without him even realizing it…
He reasoned that one day, he would step back out of the Warp Zone again…
One day, he would explain everything to his nephew…
One day, he would go see his sister…
One day, he would reunite with his old friends…
One day, he would visit his father’s grave…
One day…
One day…
Banner Photo by Tyler Callahan on Unsplash