Best I can put it together, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play on 1st June 1947.
On 1st June 1967, the Beatles mentioned that it had been twenty years since that day.
On 1st June 1987, it had been twenty years since the day upon which it had been twenty years. I know, because the morningshow made a big deal about that on the radio.
In less than a year, it’ll have been another twenty years. Sixty years since the sarge started teaching. Just in point of fact.
None of which has much of anything to do with the other fact: that it was eighteen years ago today. Except that, technically, against sixty years, that sounds like a mere thirty percent.
It still doesn’t help that much. Just saying.
Eighteen years ago was 7th September 1988. Wednesday. And some stuff happened.
School, of course. There’s never any avoiding that. Usually, I was fine with school, because I kinda liked it. But, particularly that day, it was in the damned way. For a while.
Then, following the History of Western Suck, it finally ended. And we got the hell outta there.
Mary had brought some films with her. VHS. And we’d Omnied back to my house to watch them.
I had not, until that night, actually seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So, when I think of it now, I end up thinking of Mary.
We’d rewound it over and over, trying to make sense of the nonsensical—particularly Lancelot’s teleportation. But, eventually, we got through it, exhausted from laughing so hard.
We went out back to smoke. Because: duh.
Dad had been remodelling. Inasmuch as he ever really did. He’d moved the chaise out into the backyard, to the eastern side of the house. Then he’d left it there.
Then we found it.
It was about ten at night, and we were laying on this thing, beneath one of the trees, watching the last of the year’s meteors flash across the sky. That bugged me a bit: a month ago, I’d been watching them with Susan, trying to explain why shooting stars happened at all, and how the atmosphere gets the real stars to twinkle. Those days were now over.
‘So, I left Dean.’ Mary was laying on my arm again, though the chaise wasn’t really wide enough to separate her by that much. I guess she was really more on my shoulder.
‘Cool.’
‘But you’re still with Susan. Aren’t you.’ And another meteor flashed by overhead.
‘She left me.’
Silence. Then, Mary laughed. ‘You’re joking.’
‘She left. Because I told her to.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Those were the rules. She’d do whatever I said. So, I said she should leave.’
‘And she did. Just like that.’
‘Pretty much. It’s a longer story than all that, but that’s how it ended.’
‘So, you’re available.’
‘Well…I’ve got this list of chicks who have been waiting a long time for this, and—’
She grabbed me and kissed me into silence. ‘Go out with me.’
‘It’s just such a big decision.’
She rolled on top of me, pinning my shoulders to the lounge. Her hair attacked from above, highlit by the flashes of meteors. ‘I want you first.’
And that was odd. ‘Before the others? By how much.’
‘Instead of the others. Never any others. Just us.’
‘For ever and ever.’
‘I think so. Ask me again in a million years.’
‘A million years isn’t that much time. Those meteors up there have been falling earthward for that long.’ I was exaggerating; in fact, the only meteors falling earthward for the last million years are the planetkillers we should be seeing any second now; but that didn’t seem to be something worth mentioning to a crazychick who was asking me to stay with her until eternity ended.
‘So we’ll stay together for a million years,’ she said, ‘That should be easy enough, right?’
It sounded easy. It even sounded practical. ‘Okay. We’ll try that.’
As you may have guessed by now, a million years is apparently less than eighteen. In fact, it’s exactly fourteen weeks.
You’ll get that later.