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When he wakes in the middle of the night to the other George in his hotel room, he’s surprised, firstly, by how young he looks: the tarantula-like Bambi eyes (Alex was right about that), the Williams tee, the schoolboy haircut. Only the hair is an improvement.
And funnily enough, this is the first thing the younger him asks about after staring at him for an appropriate amount of time: “How did you—the hair?” he says, running a hand through his own. Not Who are you? or Where is this? —Though George does suppose those would be stupid questions, because presumably he knows the answers. Still, he finds it amusing that the hair is the first thing he saw.
“You’ll figure it out,” he answers. He doesn’t know if this is one of those time travel scenarios where changing the past will break the universe. Also, he just doesn’t care as much as he thought he would. He has bigger problems right now than the younger version of himself standing in his hotel kitchen. “When did you get here?”
“I don’t know.” He doesn’t look confused. “A few minutes ago?”
“Okay.” He closes his eyes again, wondering how long the younger him was watching him sleep. “I have a headache right now, so I won’t talk a lot.” This is true, even if the headache is only because of this conversation. He’s lying lengthwise on the sofa, arms crossed on his chest and feet propped on the opposite armrest. He could stay here for a while. The day is done. Carmen won’t come, nor will anyone else.
“Do you… need anything?” the other him asks after a few moments of silence.
No. “Could you get me a Tylenol? They’re in the drawer.”
He watches the younger George fumble around with the knob three times before finally opening the drawer. It’s not even the right one. Jesus, he’s so useless. He doesn’t know why Toto kept him around back then. “The lower one,” he calls out unhelpfully, just to fuck with him.
“Not there either,” says the younger him, puzzled.
“Fine. Then the middle.”
This time he unlocks the drawer on the first try. “There we go!” he says once he finds the Tylenol, awkwardly proud of himself. It’s embarrassing to watch. He opens the fridge for a bottle of water, then unscrews the caps of both and brings them over to George.
He takes four or five pills and swallows them. He doesn’t touch the water. “Shit, you are real,” he says. He’s pretty sure hallucinations can’t actually bring him Tylenols.
“Yeah,” Williams George says. He feels his fingers in his hair and cold against his forehead, pressing gently on his temples. Shit, shit, shit. Definitely real. “Water?” he asks.
“No, it’s fine,” he says.
“Are you sure? You know, more than ninety percent of headaches are caused by—”
“I said it’s fine,” he snaps, cutting him off. Okay, so he’s annoying, too. “I am very sure this headache is just caused by you here.”
The younger him doesn’t even startle. “Oh,” he says, purses his lips, screws the cap on again, and places it back in the fridge. Walks back to George. He can feel the judgement radiating off him like uranium. Uranium, though, has a half-life of billions of years. He’ll be gone before that.
All right. Now he feels like shit. “Not you,” he amends belatedly. “Just today.”
“Oh,” the younger him says again, but George thinks he might look less disappointed this time. He tries to sit next to George on the sofa, but there’s not enough space, so he gingerly slides down the front until he’s on the ground next to him. George considers moving to make space for him and then decides against it.
“Are you going to ask me anything?” Williams George says after a while.
“Did you want me to,” he says.
“No, I just—” He breaks off and sighs. George is being an arse and he knows it. “Thought you’d be curious. About this.”
“Yeah, me too,” he says.
The following silence is so unbearably depressing that he relents. “Where are you from?” he asks. Not that he doesn’t know. He remembers this day in waves of empty fuzziness and spectacular clarity: climbing out of his car, going back to his hotel room, staring at the mirror until the lines of his face ingrained themselves in his memory, permanentized by acknowledging them. His hair. Even back then, he had known that he had to change it. He just didn’t know how. What else does he remember? He remembers falling asleep and arriving in this very hotel room, door already locked behind him. He remembers thinking, clearer than anything: I won’t be like that. I’m not going to be like that.
“Sakhir was today,” says the younger him. “I think you know the one. Unless there have been worse Sakhirs.”
“No.” Thank God. Just, not like this is any better.
“Can I ask you something?” the younger him says.
“Go ahead.” He’ll find out everything in five years, anyway.
“I was wondering,” he starts. Hesitates. Jesus, George already told him to go ahead. What else does he want. “When I was looking for your Tylenol. I also found a bottle labeled—"
“Don’t worry about it,” he interrupts.
“Why not?”
He turns his face into the back of the sofa. “Because you’re still happy.”
“Blimey, mate, are you crying?” the younger George says. It’s—ridiculously unfair, that even his younger self calls him mate. Like how even Alex calls him mate. “Well, it can’t get worse than this,” he says. “Cheer up!”
You can’t possibly believe that, he’s thinking. “It’s not really fun, you know. Fighting like this.” He tries to remember if he was this optimistic about life last time and comes up blank. That’s the worst part about it: he can’t even tell if the younger George is truly this hopeful or if he’s pretending. They’re different people.
“Yet we fight anyway,” Williams George says eventually. Now he really does feel like crying. Probably Williams George knows it too. Don’t be too loud, you’ll wake him. Don’t talk about anything, he’ll cry. It’s delicate as hell, this whole thing. He wonders how many times the younger him ran those words over in his head before they came out right. If he practiced them like he does in the mirror now.
Outside there are footsteps. “What do I do if someone comes in?” the younger him asks. Nothing. Nobody will come in. The younger him puts his hand on George’s shoulder and taps twice with his thumb. “Hey,” he says expectantly, should George have the answers. Which he doesn’t. “Hey.”
“She won’t,” he says. “Come in.”
Carmen doesn’t come anymore, even if it’s only because he asked her not to, a long time ago. Could you please not come to my room before races? he had told her once, and she had said, Yes, of course, if it distracts you. Which became before races and before quali and also after races, and instead he’d text Alex his room number, before Alex stopped coming over, too.
“Don’t you have to go?” he says.
“Where would I go?” asks Williams George.
He doesn’t know. He really doesn’t. Home, he wants to say. Go to Alex. Tell him to ignore anything you say in the next three years; you don’t really mean it. He takes a deep breath and turns back to face the ceiling. “Nowhere.”
“Mate,” the younger him says. He brushes George’s hair from where it’s stuck onto the damp parts of his face. “I have time, but I can leave if you want me to.”
“No,” he says. You don’t. He shakes his head, feeling the slow drag of his younger self’s fingers in his hair and on his cheek. You don’t have time. You have maybe two years, at most, until everyone hates you, and three before Alex does too.
“Okay,” says Williams George, “I’ll stay.”
The headache hasn’t left. There’s a mounting pressure moving down into the top of his jaw, hollow and ringing. That’s not what I meant, he wants to say, but the words get stuck in his throat. It’s funny, how much he’s dreamed about this—going five years into the past and making everything right—and now it’s real, and he’s not doing anything.
The younger him is tracing the loop of his ear. “How does this work?” he asks. “I go back, and then what? Does anything I do affect you?”
George shrugs. “Don’t know. I wouldn’t think too hard about it.”
He had not followed this advice last time. Instead, he’d watched as many movies and read as many books on time travel as he could find. There were the ones where each jump created a separate universe. There were the ones where any deviation from the original collapsed the universe irreparably in on itself. And his personal favorite: where the past and the future existed in the same timeline, and any changes in one also altered the other. He liked the sense of usefulness it brought. Everything he did would be something that his future self had done, because of him.
“What happened today?” Williams George asks.
“I shouldn’t tell you.”
He stands up, face moon-like and impassive above him. “The universe won’t break if you tell me.”
“Not what I’m worried about.”
“Then why not?”
He could tell him. He could recite every single one of his laps, and then every single one of Kimi’s laps, and the times, and their set-ups, and exactly what he said to Alex and what he should’ve said instead. He stares hard at the air vent on the ceiling, like it’ll open and swallow him whole. It’s paralyzing, the thought of him changing the future—Williams George’s future, which is his present, which is the thing pressing him in on both ends.
All at once those hazy fears are twisting and forming in his mind: if he tells Williams George everything, and he fixes it, it’ll mean that everything was fixable. —What a horrible thing to not want. He’s terrified of how much it might show, this cruel and jealous part of him that can’t even accept that somewhere in a parallel universe, another version of himself is living a better life. He’s surprised it doesn’t leak out of his eyes and his mouth and everything he does. He didn’t know the human body could contain something like that.
And worse than that: If he tells Williams George everything, and he can’t fix it, it’ll mean that nothing was ever fixable, in the end. Whatever path he’s been put on by the universe, it is set and it can’t be diverged. Alex’s leaving as unchangeable as the engine failure in Canada as Kimi winning Monaco five hours ago.
Now it is his younger self’s turn to cry. “Don’t do that,” the younger him says angrily, like George is the one in tears. “It’s not over yet, for Christ’s sake, it’s only—it’s only—" He walks away abruptly and grabs the hotel calendar from its stand. “It’s June. Why are you afraid?”
Suddenly he understands why the universe chose today as the day to send the younger George. He had thought, at first, that adhering exactly to what the other George had done last time when he was the one traveling through time was the only thing he could do. Now he realizes: Nothing he does here matters. Just seeing himself lying on the sofa, alone in the silent room, had been enough for the world to settle. The universe had showed him in a broad sweep of its arms and said, here is what will happen, this is how the next five years of your life will go, and he looked around, and his future crystalized before him. Nothing more than that would ever be his to lose.
“Listen,” he says, the first thing he has said today that he has not heard already. “Kimi wins Monaco from pole. Alex leaves. That’s what happens. You can try to change it. It’ll still happen.”
But his younger self does not ask who Kimi is or why Alex leaves or how the season is going and instead just sets down the calendar and walks back to George. “Forget about the race,” he says, low and blank. “Qualifying. That’s still ours.”
And he gets it, he really does: once he had believed—or maybe convinced himself—that quali was the only thing that mattered. What did Sundays show anyway, except that he was driving a Williams. Quali is measurable. In quali you can point to your teammate and say, Look, that’s where the car is supposed to be, and here’s where I am. Quali is tangible and factual and he was good at it. “It’s not,” he says. “Not anymore.” Call it luck, or the car, or the racing gods.
The younger him leans down until his mouth is only barely above George’s ear. “Next weekend, think about me,” he says.
“Why?” he asks. Nothing George does will change his world.
“Because I don’t want me to have given up.”
But George isn’t thinking about next weekend or this afternoon or Canada when the younger him leaves. He isn’t thinking about Belgium or Sakhir or Imola, even. In his head it’s March and he’s standing on the top step of the podium in Australia, champagne in his hair, damp and sweet, thinking: Maybe I changed it. Like he’s thinking now, Maybe this time.
He must harbor some hope, because he shuts his eyes and waits for the world to change around him. He must on some level believe that yes, this is still possible. His younger self is him: His potential is George’s potential. His what could bes are George’s what would’ve beens. If there were a time to change everything, if there were a way to change it—this time you have turned out alright.
He counts to ten and then opens his eyes. Everything has stayed exactly the same.