Jam Tomorrow

Prompt: The day that never comes


The last thing that Lance Corporal Jarrod Timberlake said to his bunkmates before collapsing onto his bunk was “I’m not getting up until tomorrow.” The Iraqi heat and pure exhaustion had not allowed for any other conversation.

When he woke up it was accompanied by a great deal of dizziness, like some of the hangovers he had had not long after arriving in the Middle East. After pulling early patrol the night after another wild bender, Timberlake had sworn off drinking. Well…sworn off getting drunk. Well…getting really drunk at least.

“Come on, Timberlake, get up.”

The words were quiet and amused rather than the booming and painful sound he expected given the hung over feeling. But he was not hung over. He had not been drinking last night at all. He’d had a late patrol, so it hadn’t been an option.

The owner of the quiet and amused voice, Private Dillon, helped Timberlake to his feet. He mumbled a thanks to the burly private and was grateful for once at the routine drilled into him during boot camp. He showered, shaved and dressed automatically, which was good because everything looked just a little blurry still.

But the numbers on his watch were clear enough.

“Dillon? Why the hell did you get me up at five am?”

Dillon smiled, “Because you have an early patrol. You didn’t look like you were getting up on your own…” he shrugged and went back to polishing his boots.

“I had late patrol last night, they don’t schedule you for an early one the next day. Not even the United States Army is that cruel.” Timberlake wandered over to the schedule tacked to the wall by the door and felt his mouth droop open. He was clearly marked for an early patrol.

“You had a late patrol the night before last, not yesterday,” the ever-helpful Dillon replied. “Says right there, ‘September 5th: Timberlake, Jarrod. Patrol – zero six hundred.’”

“It’s the 4th,” Timberlake corrected absently. He still felt a little out of it, and his vision was still blurry like when you opened your eyes underwater. He was able to focus on his watch after a moment and saw that he was wrong again. Something was wrong… did he have a heat stroke?

Timberlake thought about asking to see the base doc, but decided to wait on it. It was not long before six in the morning now, and he didn’t exactly expect to wake feeling alert and happy. It would pass. He hoped.

Timberlake, Dillon and two other privates, Arnolds and Henriquez, climbed into a hummvee, checked their patrol route, and rumbled into the Iraqi dawn. Timberlake opted for the back seat, leaning his helmeted head against the vibrating glass of the window. The rising sun turned the vehicle into an oven, but did nothing for his head, except change his metaphor for his blurred vision from being underwater to seeing the whole world through a heat shimmer.

Dillon had decided to ride up top, leaning on the machinegun, and Arnolds and Henriquez where in the front, chatting amiably about the poker game from yesterday afternoon. Timberlake ignored them until he felt a tingling on his wrist. He rubbed at his wrist, expecting to shoo off some biting fly (the desert had its own nasty bugs, he’d been sorry to find out), but felt nothing. It took a moment longer for him to realize that he had not even felt the band of his watch. He looked down, confused, and saw that circling his wrist was a blurred line.

It had the shape and the color of his watch, but as he watched, it grew more and more indistinct, and then he was simply staring at his naked wrist. “What the hell…?”

Henriquez turned in the front passenger seat, bracing his hand on the headrest of the driver’s seat. “What’s up?”

Timberlake opened his mouth, but he wasn’t sure what he could say. He wasn’t sure he believed what he’d just seen himself, let alone convince others it had happened as well. But his eyes caught on Henriquez’s wrist, circled by a darkening blurry line.

“That’s my watch…” Timberlake said. “How the fuck did you get my watch, Henry?”

The private flinched, pulling his hand away as if the other soldier was going to lunge for it. “Hey, if you loved the watch so much, you should quit the game when you ran out of money.” He frowned. Normally Timberlake and Henriquez got along just fine. “…you can play for it again tonight if you want to win it back.”

Timberlake, shook his head, more to shake off this persistent wrong feeling than to respond. “No…it’s okay…Sorry, Henry. I’m just out of it today.”

“Sure, no problem…You want the radio on?”

“No, I’m cool. Thanks…” Timberlake shook his head more slowly this time. “I’m gonna get some air.”

The others nodded while Timberlake clambered up from the cab to the back of the hummvee, to sit with Dillon. He found a relatively comfortable place to perch and clutched his rifle to his chest like a life-preserver. “Strange question for you, Dillon: What day is it?” Thursday, September fourth, two-thousand and eight.

“It’s Friday, man! And you and I, lucky fucks that we are, get this weekend off!” Dillon leaned casually on the machinegun, a cigarette clenched between his lips. That’s why he liked to ride up top.

“Okay, Dillon, this is going to sound fucked up, but it doesn’t feel like today. Like, yesterday was the third, and today should be the fourth, but it’s not. It’s tomorrow.” Timberlake wrung his hands around the barrel of his rifle. He knew he sounded crazy, but hell, he felt crazy right now. But Dillon had gone through boot with him, if anyone could understand, it would be the big Texan.

Dillon frowned, but that was just his thinking face. At least he was taking this seriously. “So, like, you don’t remember yesterday?”

“I remember yesterday, but yesterday was Wednesday, not Thursday. Today, should be Thursday and tomorrow is Friday.”

“But today is Friday,” Dillon drawled.

“That’s what I’m saying: this is tomorrow, not today,” Timberlake sighed. This was crazy, but rather than sounding ridiculous once spoken, like the night fears of children when looked at in the light of day, the idea grew in strength.

“I dunno, Jarrod… I remember yesterday and it was the fourth.” He crouched on the back of the hummer and pushed his helmet back, frowning even more deeply, trying to make this make sense for his friend’s sake.

“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today…” Timberlake muttered.

“What’s that?”

Timberlake spoke up over the road noise. “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. It’s something from Alice in Wonderland or something. Like, if you’re going to have jam tomorrow you don’t, because when it’s tomorrow, it’s not tomorrow anymore, it’s today. Get it?”

“Man, I never got Alice in Wonderland,” Dillon shook his head.

Timberlake was determined to lay it out for his friend, to make it make sense so he at least wouldn’t be alone in this crazy idea, but he didn’t say anything. Dillon was getting blurry. Everything was blurry, just a little bit, but Dillon was getting really blurry. Like the watch.

“Mike!?”

Timberlake grabbed at the burly private, but he even felt blurry and indistinct. The blurred shape lost definition and color until it was a shapeless blob. Then it began to clear. Color and form returned, but Dillon didn’t.

“You okay, Timberlake?” Henriquez asked.

“What are you doing up here, Henry?”

The little Latino looked strangely at the corporal. “Uh…dude, we came up here to ditch Parkinson. She never shuts up.”

Timberlake craned his head to look into the cab of the bouncing vehicle. Arnolds was stuck driving, unable to escape Parkinson, a woman who had decided to fend off the men of the unit by being as annoying as she possibly could.

“Where’s Dillon!?” Timberlake demanded. He had almost had him convinced, almost had an ally in making sense of the impossible.

The color drained from Henriquez’s face and his bemused expression melted away. “Dude…Dillon’s dead.” He stared at Timberlake with real concern. “Yesterday, man. Suicide bomber. Happened right after the poker game…You okay, amigo?”

Timberlake stared ahead. Yesterday he and Dillon had been on late patrol. He’d been by the big Texan’s side every hour of the day.

Henriquez looked around, as if to make sure that no one could overhear him, perched as he was on the back of an armored jeep rumbling along a remote desert road. “It’s not your fault, Timberlake.”

Timberlake looked up, shocked.

“He went out to get a pack of smokes, but you were still wiped out from the late patrol the night before. Amigo, if you had gone with him, you’d have both been blown away…” He clapped his hand on Timberlake’s shoulder awkwardly.

“Everything’s changing…” He mumbled.

But Henriquez, worried and listening closely caught the comment. “Aint truer words ever been spoken.”

“Because this is tomorrow. It hasn’t happened yet… when things happen today, it changes what’s happening now, in tomorrow.” All the fuzziness, the blurriness, it was because tomorrow was still being shaped by today. That’s why nothing stayed still, because it was all changing moment to moment. Butterflies flapping their wings and all that shit.

Henriquez frowned, not a thoughtful expression on his face. “Uh, yeah… too deep for me though. I’m glad you volunteered to speak at the wake, not me.”

Yeah, he would have volunteered to speak at the wake. And once he got stateside he’d go see Dillon’s family in Texas. The big man talked about them so damned much, Timberlake felt like he knew them, like they were his family too.

Machinegun fire ripped into the silence. Cursing, Henriquez stood up and grabbed the machinegun’s grip, adding its chatter to the sudden storm of noise. Timberlake grabbed his rifle and searched for targets, dusty shapes in the scrub at the side of the road. He aimed and fired, grateful once again for the responses battered into his body by boot camp. No matter how strange or out of place he was, his body knew what to do.

Gunfire drowned out all thought, until some kind of explosive went off next to the hummvee, throwing Timberlake over the side. At least he was already used to being dizzy and peering through clouded vision, he hardly felt any different.

The gunfire went on and then Henriquez came sliding through the rough sand to his side. “Oh, shit, shit, shit, man… This area was supposed to be clear. It was clear a few days ago…must have snuck in yesterday.” Henriquez fired a few rounds, changed clips, fired again. “We gotta get you up, man.”

Timberlake smiled. He’d just though of something funny. Hell, he was dying, why not share it? “I’ll get up tomorrow…or yesterday…but not today.”


Jarrod Timberlake woke up to the sound of snoring. Only one, very large, set of nostrils on the base made a sound like that. Or else a helicopter was landing outside the bunkhouse. The Lance Corporal propped himself up in bed and looked around. Mike Dillon was lying on the bunk next to his, legs sticking out over the end of the bed, snoring like a band saw.

Timberlake checked his watch – wrapped snugly around his wrist once again – and saw the date: Thursday September fourth, two thousand and eight. It was a big day today.