Last Chance to See

Written by Anakin McFly

Marty remembered that night: November 12th, 1955, the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. Marvin and the Starlighters playing on the sea-themed stage, high school students plying the dance floor. He remembered that night well; he had to.

It was the night he’d nearly been erased from existence, the night when everything that had been building up that week finally came all right, all in the nick of time just like some movie. He remembered the feeling of almost not-being, the world fading away and him pondering: If he didn’t exist, did the world?

But then George had kissed Lorraine and life and existence had shot back into him and the world was real again, his fingers feeling every string of the guitar in his hands.

Dark clouds in the sky. The Great Hill Valley Lightning Storm of ’55; the lightning bolt that had sent him back to the future as it ended the life of the town’s greatest monument at exactly 10:04 pm. And all the while, him wondering if he’d have enough time to warn his best friend of his future death in Marty’s past.

He may have had a time machine, but he never had enough time.

Back in ’85, things had changed. For the better, definitely, but sometimes the familiar bad is more comforting than the foreign good. His home, the one he’d grown up in and had always known, was gone for good along with the dysfunctional family he knew, replaced by a bright cheery home straight out of one of those interior decoration magazines, filled with well-adjusted individuals that looked like his family but weren’t, not really.

He felt a weird nostalgia for a time he used to hate and which now no longer existed, when his mother was fat and his brother worked at Burger King and his sister was a loser and his father wore black-rimmed spectacles and laughed at reruns of The Honeymooners after another day of being pushed around by his supervisor. When they had peanut brittle for dinner and his mother frowned upon his relationship with Jennifer and he didn’t mind when people called him chicken.

Jennifer – she had changed too, changed surprisingly much under the unrelenting fingers of the space-time continuum. He thought it slightly odd, actually, that his family members still looked more or less the same, whereas Jennifer was now a totally different person, looks-wise most of all, and in some areas of her personality.

He’d almost not noticed, in fact, his memories quickly filling in over his old ones, until that night when he’d woken up with a jolt after a dream about the old Jennifer, and he’d realised that she no longer looked the same as she used to.

It made him feel guilty, almost, to think about that no-longer-existing version of her, although he justified it by the fact that it still was Jennifer, who had, in some other timeline, been his girlfriend.

Sometimes he lay awake in bed saddened by the fact that that old world was no more, alive only in his memories which were also slowly fading, and he wondered where those memories went.

This world was his, he realised, all his own doing. Any difference between this world and the old one from 1955 onwards was all his, his creation, his masterpiece.

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He stands by the doorway of his home basked in the warm light of the kitchen as the door closes behind Biff, and he knows he’s supposed to say something about the car being wrecked; but the words won’t come now. He doesn’t want to ruin this last glimpse of the old world.

He remembers this night, his last one here before everything changed.

His father, George, positioned awkwardly by the counter as he watches Biff go, face still showing signs of the wretched nervous laughter of seconds ago. His mouth moves slightly in an almost deranged half-grin as if he wants to say something but can’t think of what.

Marty just watches him silently. Remembering, pitying, missing this version of his father, such a far cry from the confident, self-assured science-fiction author he is in the new world. He made him that way, but this, this here, now – this was what George McFly was originally meant to be.

“Uncle Joey didn’t make parole.”

The thin cake slides onto the table in its metal tray as Marty munches on his dinner. Peanut brittle cracks between his teeth, spreading its flavour through his mouth. He swallows, and feels the chewed food slide down his throat just like it had in reality.

This is what his life was meant to be. It was the original plan, not that new world he’d created. Better, maybe, but unnatural, unintentional, unreal nightmarish perfection. Real was sitting cramped around the dinner table with his screwed up family listening to Lorraine recount once again the story of how she and George got together long ago once upon a time warp in a place and time no longer extant. And George – still trying to hide from the pathetic reality of his life, drowning his sorrows in television reruns and trying to pretend that he’s just fine, totally excellent, Biff just happened to be his supervisor and he’s just not very good at confrontations – George just sitting there like a painful foreshadowing of what Marty might end up like in future: hopeless.

“Your father kissed me for the very first time on that dance floor. It was then I realised I was going to spend the rest of my life with him.”

Present perfect tense. The new world was his present, and it was perfect, and it was tense. For him, anyway. He always felt as if he didn’t deserve it, but then again he was the one who made it happen. His little utopia, it had seemed at first.

Yet utopia can never be reached, for it is a state of unreachable paradise, perhaps because when you’re living in paradise, you start to miss things as they were when everything was imperfect and life sucked. Because that’s what’s real.

Marty knew this night. He knew how he had gone to lie down in his bed fully clothed and fully intending to stay up until the time came to go over to Twin Pines Mall – Lone Pines Mall? – and get introduced to Doc’s little time machine, fully oblivious of the fact that his step out of his house would be the last time he’d ever get to leave the place, for in future it would be a whole different home that he would be leaving.

Marty knows, and this time he doesn’t want to make that same mistake. He takes the phone off the hook, not wanting Doc’s call to wake his sleeping family.

The rest of the McFlys are asleep when Marty pads out of his bedroom in the near darkness and into the living room. He turns on a lamp and squints briefly at the sudden light, then gets down on the carpeted floor – gaze lingering temporarily on the stain by one of the shelves where Lorraine had once thrown up after another night of binge drinking. The stain isn’t there in the new world.

Marty opens the cupboards and carefully takes out the old photo albums lying untidily inside, trying not to set loose any more dust than necessary. His fingers explore the peeling fake leather cover, then he lifts it up, gazing at yellowed page after page of the photo album on which are mounted the pictorial memories of the old world, flipping through the stories of a non-existent time.

Then sunlight shines through the bedroom window and the dream breaks as Marty wakes, back in his bed in the new world he created, a stranger in a strange land who can never return home.

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