Chapter Text
“What do we want,” Larry said, with the phone book out on the kitchen counter. “Fast or good?” Off Charlie’s blank look, he seemed to realize he hadn’t said the first part of the conversation and added, “Pizza.”
“I vote good,” Charlie said. Honestly, if someone had asked him he wouldn’t have been sure there was pizza delivery in 1982, so this was great news.
“Excellent choice. Any preferences? I like to get everything.”
“No, that’s fine,” Charlie said. He watched Larry dial the phone on the wall, realized he was kind of staring, and tried to come up with something to fill the silence. “Hey,” he said, “what did the Zen monk say to the hot dog vendor?”
Larry grinned back at him with the phone receiver cradled by his ear. “‘Make me one with everything,’” he replied, and then said “hi, yes,” into the phone and placed an order that reminded Charlie of that scene in the Dirk Gently books where the American writer ordered what was described as pretty much a pizza with an extra pizza on it.
It made Charlie smile to himself, and almost say something about white pizza — but this Larry had yet to dream up his white-foods kick. That was his Larry, decades in the future. Clearly this one found his symmetry in other places.
The moment he hung up the phone, Larry resumed their conversation from yesterday, pulling notes out of his slim briefcase and making use of the available flat surfaces — which mostly meant the big Japanese futon mattress on the floor, because the desk in the corner was completely covered with books and papers already. It was only much later, seated on the futon mattress surrounded by notes and paper plates, warmed by the cozy fireplace, that Charlie really noticed how Larry had kept the conversation going nonstop at all the moments when Charlie should’ve stepped in to help pay for the food.
That was pretty typical of Larry, who was never concerned with what people owed him. But it brought Charlie back to how unsustainable all of this was. Larry’s innate generosity and counterculture attitude wouldn’t keep this going forever — might not last the next half-hour, for all he knew — and there was no road map from there.
Soon enough, Charlie would just be alone in the past. And all of this — the pages of equations — was useless, a lot of spherical cows, its only real value an excuse to talk to Larry in the first place.
Larry had to nudge his arm a little to get his attention, and Charlie realized he was being offered a beer.
“You seem a little zoned out there,” Larry said, his voice sympathetic.
Charlie had no idea how long he’d been staring at the same page, but he knew he must have looked worse than zoned-out. He took the beer, meeting Larry’s eyes only briefly, and popped the tab. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Larry said.
There were people who just lived like this, Charlie thought. Who walked into situations where they didn’t know the rules, said yes to things, found out what they could get away with. Took the chance that they might get something wrong. That was the world Charlie’s fake self was living in, for the moment. Sometimes that was Larry’s world; Larry’s combination of habit-bound and unpredictable was uniquely his own.
Charlie remembered when he’d found out that Larry was going to leave his position at Princeton and come to CalSci. Charlie hadn’t thought he would actually do it, when he’d told Larry how much he would love it there. It was mostly a way of saying how much he missed him.
And when Larry’d called and told him he was taking the CalSci job, Charlie said out loud, “holy shit, I didn’t think you were going to actually do it,” and Larry laughed softly, and he said something about Kurt Vonnegut and…. unusual travel suggestions. Something about dancing with god? Charlie couldn’t remember exactly. Dancing in the heavens.
He thought of Larry up there in orbit, dancing among the stars. Larry would scold him for the inaccuracy, of course, being in reality no closer to the stars than Charlie was on Earth. But Larry wasn’t here. Although Larry also was here, off in the kitchen a few steps away. Both present and absent at the same time, until you opened the box.
Charlie drifted off, thinking of a poetic, scientifically inaccurate scene of his Larry getting to sleep while free-floating on the space station, doing a gentle rotation within his orbital path; and he was vaguely aware of the notebook under his cheek being swapped out for a pillow as he fell into deep sleep.
When he woke up the next morning, Larry was already up, with coffee and a newspaper on the kitchen counter. Charlie had slept like a log all night, presumably on the warmest spot in the house, where Larry and his ex-girlfriend must have slept all winter. Larry, he guessed, would’ve had to take the bedroom — which probably wasn’t too bad with the electricity back on, he hadn’t seen the bedroom yet but it probably had a space heater or whatever.
“You really didn’t have to,” Charlie said, rubbing his eyes.
“I don’t think the Concorde would’ve woken you up,” Larry said amiably. “Sometimes you’ve just gotta crash. I’ve got coffee on if you want some.”
Charlie couldn’t help a sleepy smile. One time, not too long ago, he and Larry had sequestered themselves in the garage all day and well into the night tinkering with something for Robot Wars. He’d stepped back into the house for a few minutes to make some more coffee, and when he got back to the garage Larry was curled up on the sofa sound asleep, snoring an unbearably cute little cartoon-like snore.
Of course, that had never happened to ‘Charlie Kepler’. Charlie, as he needed to keep reminding himself, was supposed to be someone who had never met Larry before, let alone had all these years of easily showing up in each other’s spaces, mi casa es tu casa, mi— office? what was the Spanish for office? Anyway, in each other’s offices so much you could only tell them apart by the level of organizational chaos, despite the fact that they worked in different buildings.
That was his reality back home. Here, Charlie was a guest in the house of a kind-hearted stranger who was easily diverted by odd new theories.
Larry was looking down, stirring his spoon around in his coffee, and it was clear he was working his way up to saying something; probably something awkward-but-no-longer-avoidable like, ‘by the way, you owe me for the pizza’ or ‘do you need a ride back to wherever it is you actually live?’
Eventually Larry took a quick little breath, looked up from his coffee, and said, “Well. I don’t know what you’ve got going on today, but I usually head out for a hike on Saturdays. The trails around campus get busy when the weather’s good, so I was going to check one out a little way out of town — it’s supposed to have, uh, nice views.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. “Is— there room for two?”
“Insofar as my car could be said to have room for two, which you already have enough data to judge for yourself.”
“Sure, I’m in, why not,” Charlie said, hoping he sounded chill. “Unusual travel suggestions, right?”
“Ah, yes indeed,” Larry said with a grin. “‘As Bokonon says: peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god.’” Charlie had thought it was a Kurt Vonnegut quote, and he didn’t know who Bokonon was, but he nodded like he got it.
On the drive out of Princeton proper, Larry left him in the car to pop into a corner store. Charlie rolled his window down with the handle, just because he could. The air was fresh and cool. It felt like maybe later it would rain. After a few minutes, Larry came back with some groceries that he stuffed into the Bug’s funny little excuse for a back seat. There was a nice-smelling loaf of French bread sticking out the top of one of the bags.
Larry hauled a shoebox full of cassette tapes out of the back, which he handed to Charlie, saying “Knock yourself out,” before turning the ignition. The fact that he’d again created a diversion when it should’ve been the appropriate time to chip in some money didn’t escape Charlie’s notice.
The tape box had about an even mix of actual albums and Maxell tapes with handwritten labels. Charlie pulled out one of the latter and read the unfamiliar title aloud. “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys?”
“A good album for a drive,” Larry said. Charlie had never heard of it, but he popped it in the tape deck. It started off kind of hippie-sounding. There were flutes. Charlie didn’t really care what they listened to; right now, he was having a hard time keeping in mind that the situation he was in was an emergency, and not a vacation.
It’d been ages since he’d gotten to go on a hike with Larry, even longer since the hikes had been any fun. The months leading up to the launch had been an extremely fitness-oriented time for Larry, of course. His vast wandering mind, full of observations about every bug and lichen on the way, was repurposed for tracking muscle mass and heartbeats per minute.
And all the while, Charlie knew that he should be proud of this giant undertaking. Of his friend’s ability to make something so new and extraordinary of himself at the half-century mark in his life. Why couldn’t he just be proud of him? Why did it feel like such terrible news? Why did this gnawing fear have to crowd out everything else?
It took about half an hour’s drive to get to the trailhead, which was somewhere up near New Brunswick, though Charlie didn’t recognize this particular spot. The trail was quiet, lush with shady trees, and Charlie wanted nothing more than to hear Larry’s tangents again, so he looked around and said “Any good mushrooms out here?” and then he didn’t have to come up with anything else to say for a while.
The mid-point of the hike took them along the water, where they found a good spot to take a break, unpacking the little bundle of groceries Larry’d brought along on the walk. Larry had picked up bread, cheese, apples — and, to Charlie’s surprise, a pack of Camels, which he must have noticed Charlie staring at because he made sort of an abortive gesture and said, “you know, I’ll just,” and jerked his thumb away from where they were about to sit down.
“Sorry,” Charlie said, though he wasn’t especially sorry and definitely didn’t want to be near the cigarette smoke. “I just, um.”
“No, don’t apologize,” Larry said. “You’re quite right. But if I don’t get my fix of toxic fumes today I’m going to be impossible to deal with, so, might as well do it now.” He licked his fingertip and held it up to figure out which way was downwind, then wandered off along the lakeside until he was almost out of sight.
Charlie sat there eating an apple and looking out over the lake, trying to remember if he’d ever seen Larry with a cigarette before. He’d completely forgotten how much everyone used to smoke. The fussy protective instinct it provoked in him was silly, he knew, because he was literally from Larry’s future, where the guy was going to be healthy enough to join the space program after 25 more years of teaching physics and getting most of his exercise on nature hikes.
Charlie looked up, as he often did when thinking about Larry up in space. The sky was a pleasant blue with wispy white clouds and, of course, contained neither Larry nor the International Space Station, the latter of which didn’t exist yet.
“Now, that’s a whopper of a Laetiporus behind you,” Larry said as he headed back to the clearing. Charlie looked behind him, where there was a very damp-looking tree stump with some bugs crawling around.
“This guy?” Charlie said, pointing at the only thing that looked like a whopper, the tiered mass of unsettlingly yellow-orange mushrooms curving around a large section of the tree stump’s circumference.
“That guy,” Larry said. “Laetiporus sulphureus, ‘chicken of the woods.’ Or ‘lobster of the woods,’ depending on one’s regional staple meats. A fruitbody of that size is a rare find.”
“Should we take some back and cook it up?” Charlie said, his innate pickiness overridden by an unexpectedly cozy mental image of making dinner in Past Larry’s kitchen with what they foraged on their walk.
“God, no,” Larry said. “I’m sick of wild mushrooms.” Oh, right, Charlie thought — that’d be Off-Grid Girlfriend’s legacy again. “Don’t let that stop you, though, if you want to get some. It’s quite safe.”
Charlie prodded curiously at the sizable fungus. A little chunk of the yellow edge broke off easily, oozing a liquid that he tried not to get on him, even if it was quite safe.
“Though I did see plenty of Alliaria petiolata,” Larry went on, “and I wouldn’t hate having some of that, now that you mention it. We’d be doing the place a favor — it is invasive, after all. Did you notice how much of it there was on the way up?”
“Can’t say I did,” Charlie said. He stepped up to the edge of the water and rinsed the mushroom gunk off his fingers, sifting through a few interestingly shaped pebbles.
“Commonly known as garlic mustard. Broad heart-shaped leaves and clusters of four white flowers. I’ll show you on the way back. Ah,” Larry said, picking a seemingly random rock out of Charlie’s hand and holding it up between his fingers and thumb. “And what you have here, of course, is the elusive sex stone.”
“…Why is it called that,” Charlie said, looking cautiously at the small gray pebble between Larry’s fingertips.
“Because it’s just a fucking rock,” Larry said, immensely pleased with himself, continuing to giggle as Charlie grabbed the rock back out of his hand and chucked it into the lake.
On the walk back they got into a long, spirited discussion of Isaac Newton’s weird alchemy thing, occasionally interrupted by Larry’s detours to collect that invasive mustard plant he’d been talking about. It was so comfortable being together, Charlie kept forgetting that they were supposed to have just met the day before yesterday.
He pondered on the drive back to the house, in companionable silence with the sunlight beginning to fade, how it was that Larry didn’t already have someone at Princeton to spend his Saturday hikes with. Thinking of it now, he also hadn’t seen Larry with anyone at the dining hall that first day, though his Larry, in the 21st century, was always with company at lunch — the string theory club, or what’s-her-name who taught philosophy of science, or, well, usually Charlie himself.
It didn’t seem to make sense that Larry would have fewer people around in his younger days. He was the same guy with even more energy and boyish charm. He was surrounded by other people on his intellectual level, certainly. Then again — raw IQ was no guarantee of understanding. There were plenty of incredibly intelligent people at Princeton, sure, but there was only one Larry anywhere.
Charlie felt like he’d turned over one more puzzle piece. Larry’s peculiar-travel-suggestions attitude wasn’t the only reason he’d decided to invite some unkempt eccentric to his house and keep him around for a field trip. This Larry, the young wunderkind professor, was lonely. Strange to think of. He’d never seemed that way in the time they’d known each other. Single, often. But lonely, no.
It was dark when they pulled up at Larry’s house. The sudden cutoff of the music on the stereo snapped Charlie’s mind back to the present, and all its unsustainable juxtapositions — I spent a great day with my favorite person to hang out with and this is a total stranger whose hospitality is gonna wear out soon and maybe I’ve bonked my head and hallucinated all of this in five seconds of real time and my life has changed forever.
“Forgot how much I liked this album,” Larry said, popping the tape out. “Well—.” Another of those little pauses. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Yeah, that sounds great.”
Charlie followed him up to the house, newly thankful for Larry’s continual unawareness of both the passage of time and the existence of social norms. He figured he should make some kind of gesture toward the fact that he knew he didn’t live here, and so gravitated toward the Japanese futon mattress that was still cluttered up from yesterday.
“Sorry, I left my stuff all over the place,” Charlie said, though the notebooks they’d used last night were all actually Larry’s. He’d been staying out of the stuff in his own bag, neurotically worried that bringing out his future-manufactured objects would somehow contaminate the past more than his own actual self. Either way, he started to busy himself clearing off the futon.
“Good news,” Larry said from the hallway across the room. “The thermostat has made its hotly anticipated return, and with it I can finally declare this house restored to the twentieth century.”
“That’s great, Larry.” Charlie smiled to himself, stacking up the notes.
Larry leaned around a stack of books to pop the cassette tape from the car into a little stereo that was largely concealed by the clutter, and then wandered off to some other room in Charlie’s peripheral vision.
After the mental reset of a good long day outside, the work they’d done yesterday didn’t actually look like total garbage anymore. There might be something here. Charlie paused in his attempt at tidying, started paging back through some of the calculations that were at least internally supportable. It would be really fascinating if any of this worked, he thought. His Larry would love it, when he got home.
It was a couple minutes before this Larry came back and joined him on the futon mattress, sitting by his side to point at their notes. “Your problem is prediction,” he said. “For your model to function, you’d need a solar flare coinciding with a coronal mass ejection. —Well, not coinciding at the point of origin, but coinciding as they impact Earth’s atmosphere, obviously. Which are two celestial phenomena that we have no ability to predict. So far.”
Charlie looked to the page, then back up to Larry. “Damn, you’re good,” he said, and Larry shrugged with a little smile, never one for false modesty.
Charlie noticed, at this close range, that Larry’s breath smelled minty. He must have gone to brush his teeth just now, to get rid of the cigarette breath from earlier. That was considerate —
He realized Larry was about to try to kiss him at the same moment that he realized he wanted Larry to kiss him; in the same moment that some part of him was piping up to object but I’m not, and he tilted his head and leaned in so they could kiss properly and he thought, well, apparently I am.
For a while after that, Charlie was too busy rearranging his priors to think about anything else. Young Larry liked men, he liked Charlie specifically, he knew how to kiss. It was dawning on Charlie that this was, in fact, a date, this had been a date the whole time, and he just didn’t recognize it because he was actually enjoying himself.
Even the tape that Charlie’d picked out randomly in the car was definitely makeout music, he realized with a wry smile. Synchronicity. It interrupted the kiss a little when Charlie smiled to himself, and Larry pulled back a few inches and grinned back, and touched Charlie’s chin and kissed him again. He brushed his fingertips down the hair on Charlie’s bare arm, which was not a body part Charlie was used to people being interested in.
Larry wasn’t pushy at all, clearly really liked what they were already doing with hands so far occupied above the waist, which was only making Charlie more acutely aware that they were in bed — well, on a bed — which was not a problem per se, it was surprisingly far from being a problem, but. Charlie kind of wasn’t sure what was expected of him in this situation. He didn’t know much about gay sex, honestly, beyond a basic theoretical grounding.
He guessed he could just say so. That felt very not-a-problem too. It felt kind of sexy. It had been a long time since Larry had something new to teach him. Right about then, having that thought, was when he suddenly stopped and thought about what he was doing, oh god what the hell was he doing he’d lost his fucking mind.
“—I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do this.”
Larry drew back and pressed his steepled hands to his mouth in an absurdly familiar gesture, looking startled and a little hurt and maybe concerned that this was going to turn ugly all of a sudden, because 1982, and Charlie felt like shit, and they also both had hard-ons, don’t look at his dick what in god’s name is wrong with you, get out of this room.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said again. “I’m — I’m gonna go make some coffee.” And he fled to the kitchen before Larry said anything in reply.
Total fucking disaster. Charlie just stood in the middle of the kitchen rubbing his forehead for a little bit, and when he opened his eyes it was unfortunately all still there.
The kitchen was achingly similar to how it looked in the nineties when Charlie’d first seen Professor Fleinhardt’s house. That might even be the same coffee maker. Putting more caffeine into this situation didn’t feel like it would actually solve any problems, but it gave Charlie something to do with his hands while he internally berated himself.
Even now he was having a hard time keeping his thoughts on the subject of how much he’d screwed up, since he was also still thinking about everything that was just happening and how much he wanted to turn around and go back to the futon. They could still be kissing right now. Was it so much worse than any of the other choices he’d made so far? What are you really worried about, the space-time continuum or the gay thing?
None of the usual voices-of-reason in his head — a list that started with his dad and only went downhill from there — were people he wanted to field that question from.
He heard a quiet sigh from the doorway to the kitchen, and turned to see Larry leaning against the door frame with his shoulders hunched over, hands stuffed in his pockets. “It’s funny,” he said, “when people actually are making a pass at me I invariably think they’re not. You’d think over time I would perform at least as well as random chance, but no.”
“I have that same problem,” Charlie said with a little smile.
“I just don’t want you to think—“ Larry looked up to the ceiling, seemed to find no inspiration there. “I just. The sobering thought has occurred to me that you now, probably, feel like I was out to — extract something from you for room and board, which honestly was not—“
The very idea made Charlie laugh out loud, and Larry furrowed his brow. “Well, it happens,” he went on.
“I know, Larry, I’m just… trying to imagine you in that role.” Charlie shook his head. “Don’t worry. I didn’t think that.”
“Hm,” Larry said, the lines in his forehead getting deeper.
“Hey, listen,” Charlie said, with a tiny sidelong glance before breaking eye contact again. He felt like he was probably blushing a little bit. “I liked it. I like you. It’s not personal.” That very last part was a lie, of course, it could hardly be any more personal, but it felt less false than anything else he could come up with.
Larry watched him from the doorway, quiet and pensive, as Charlie busied himself at the kitchen counter in the uncomfortable silence. Charlie realized belatedly, looking at the mug in his hand, that he’d now made a cup of coffee matching Larry’s usual. “Um,” Charlie said. “How do you take your coffee?”
“Just like that, as it happens,” Larry said.
“Oh, perfect. Well. You take this one, then.” Charlie handed him the mug. Larry took it and set it down on the counter, like he wanted to have his hands free. Charlie was going to grab another coffee for himself, but Larry was now staring so hard at him, he wasn’t sure what to do.
“How do you know where everything is in my kitchen?” Larry said, in a tone that Charlie wasn’t sure he’d ever heard from him before.
“—I don’t,” Charlie lied, uselessly.
“You have some strong opinions about my personal character, although we just met. You have this, albeit very interesting, question that has little relevance to anything I’ve ever published on, but you approached me specifically.”
Larry was ticking points off on his fingers. His face was hard, puzzled, but there was fear behind it too — obviously, rationally, when Charlie thought about all the decisions he’d made since arriving here. The fear on his best friend’s face was his fault, and he had no idea how to fix it.
“You know how I organize my kitchen. You know how I take my coffee. —and I don’t know you who you are, Charlie.” He looked at him with the eyes of a stranger. “And you’re in my house.”