The following story is complete fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or their circumstances is purely coincidental. In the parts where I do mention real people, none of what is described happened. This is just fantasy after all.

My next door neighbor seemed, from a distance, a rather odd bird. When he was home, he was always dressed in white with several gold medallions hanging around his neck. He also wore a skull cap. But when I got to meet him, I found he was actually a really calm, jovial guy with an easy laugh. He didn't smoke, drink alcohol or carouse. He had grown up in a mountainous northern border town in India not far from Nepal. He had  begun his working life early with menial jobs at a local hotel. He scrimped and saved and, using the growing network of Indians in the U.S., emigrated here, worked his butt off and eventually owned several chain hotel properties. I guess the best way one could describe him was as an ascetic businessman, iff that description could ever make sense.

However, he was also apparently a member of an obscure religious sect in his native land. He wouldn't give the details of their practices, but he called it a synthesis of Hinduism, Buddhism and a local brand of animism that was as old as time itself. To me, it just sounded like another offshoot religious sect, of which there are thousands in the world.

I had noticed recently, though, that he had stopped working in his front and back yards. I usually saw him doing at least a little bit of that every single day. This was important to him, he explained, because we are all caretakers for the world that God had mercifully and kindly provided to us and so it was incumbent on mankind to keep it beautiful and bounteous.

I went over and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I climbed over his backyard gate and peered through the window of his sliding glass backdoor.and saw his body slumped over his computer desk, which he had put against one wall of his dining room.  I got the hell out of there and called the police to do a welfare check on him. The cops showed up and I went out to talk to them. One of those officers did as I had, climbed over the back gate and saw the body. "Hey Chuck, looks like we might have a decedent here. Better call the paramedics." The one cop took the sliding glass back door off of its track to gain entrance and I followed them. By the stench, it was obvious he had been dead for 3-4 days. "No signs of trauma here, Don. "Yeah, we didn't find any narcotics other than some blood pressure medication. Probably just a massive coronary." "Yeah, looks that way." I was asked if I knew a next of kin for him, but I didn't because the guy had pretty much kept to himself. The officers subsequently received a call about a robbery of a convenience store that had just occurred. I stated that I would look through his effects for them and call if I found anything. They took my information, including some pictures of me, in case I stole anything, and then went on their call once the paramedics had loaded my now ex-neighbor's body onto a gurney to transport it to the morgue for an autopsy.

Of course, a passing on any block puts a pall on the place for a few days. It's all part of the human fear of death and our ability to empathize with the family of the party that passed on.

I put the sliding glass door back on its rail and locked it and then secured the front door and windows while I looked through the house for information on the possible whereabouts of family or associates. I went into his bedroom, which was adorned with religious tapestries and art work. Against one wall was what appeared to be an altar upon which was an image of a deity. On either side of the image were candles. And front and center was a luminescent gold medallion that was set into a small wooden plynth, maybe six inches high. Next to that medallion was what appeared to be a tract like one of those Jesus comics that religious zealots handed out when I was in junior high. It had a picture of the medallion on it. It was written in what I'm guessing was Hindi, except it was also transliterated into roman script. I took the tract, went out to his computer and tried using various translation programs to find out what it said. After a couple of hours of that, including using alternative sites to break it down word by word, here is the best I could make of it.

"He who prays to Vishnu daily with this medallion may alter their form and become who they wish when they wish, but they may have no power over others nor affect the chronicles of history. For it is only God who is the guiding lamp of societies and the power behind the fate of mankind." In other words, the claimed power of the medallion was that one could become anyone they felt like and travel through time, but they couldn't make people their slaves and whatever they did at anytime would only affect their immediate relationship and not the whole of history itself.

Of course, we all live by what is in front of our nose. We have little direct sense of external forces determining our apprehension of time and our remembrance of events. So my question was, then, did my neighbor essentially go through his life shape and time shifting before the man upstairs finally plucked his number? Time seems so static to people, so he could conceivably have been hanging out in 19th century England as one person and then in 21st century America as another. Or a whole series of people. Man, this was mind blowing to contemplate!

While I probably shouldn't have, I took the medallion and the tract and left it on my dresser in my bedroom. Then I continued my foraging through my late neighbor's belongings and his computer files. I eventually came upon a small phone book with some numbers that had Indian names in it and informed the police, who then called those numbers. The odd thing was that the instructions that came back from his family and/or associates was:to take his assets, put them in a pyre, burn them and then sell the house and donate the proceeds to orphans in India. Nobody was willing or could come to his house to oversee the disposition of his things, which was bizarre, but I'm sure this happens more than people would think. So I became a kind of drive by executor. Local laws would not permit the pyre. I mean, this was Southern California, where you can't even legally shoot off fireworks. So what effects had any value I sold off and the rest went to a landfill. His personal papers, excluding those that had to do with his business interests, I shredded. I managed to sell off his hotel/motel franchises and, finally, his house, and found some orphan charities to give all the money to. I didn't take one penny from all this other than to pay for the expenses of cleaning up and renovating the house to make it more attractive to potential buyers and attorney's fees.

I had been so preoccupied by all this that I totally forgot about the medallion even though it sat in my bedroom on  my dresser. When I was finally able to have some real time for myself, I decided I would play some games with the medallion to see if it had any real power. At the very least, if it was just another religious trinket like those I had amassed during my travels overseas, it would be a cool addition to my collection. It was a great little piece of art, in my opinion.

I got on my knees in front of the dresser and prayed to Vishnu for his indulgence and mercy and expressed my gratitude for the life that he had bestowed upon me and for the world upon which I was permitted to reside. I rose to my feet and put both my hands on the medallion. "I want to look, move and vocally sound exactly like the Japanese rock singer Mari Hamada when she was 21, except with C cups breasts, a totally hairless torso and legs, an inability to get pregnant no matter how many times I have sex, immune to all sexually transmitted diseases, the same sex drive I had as an 18 year old male, a wide ranging and sexy wardrobe and a Lexus, semen will taste good to me, I will possess inherent knowledge of how to best make myself up and care for my hair and will be able to cook to the level of the best chefs in the world, I will not physically or mentally age or be a victim of any crime or accident, the tellers at my bank will know me on sight and not hassle me for ID, and I will go back to 1988,  where I will be living in my own beautifully furnished and decorated two story house, including a shrine to Vishnu, in Seco Alta with $50 million US in the bank, a whole array of platinum credit cards with no limits, my identity documents will show my name as being Misa Notohara and I will be a virtuoso guitarist and keyboard player who would know how to correctly play a song after hearing it just once and be able to speak Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Korean fluently in addition to English.I am now ready for the transformation."

Suddenly,  I blacked out. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the early morning, probably around 6:30 a.m., and I groped around for my glasses. But they were nowhere to be found and I was starting to panic. My vision cleared and I realized I could see everything perfectly. As the cobwebs in my head dissipated further, I looked around my bedroom, which was completely different from the one I was used to. Then I remembered the medallion. "Oh shit, could it be that it worked?" I asked myself.

As was customary for me in the morning since I was a little kid, I felt the need to go have a piss upon waking up. I trudged sleepily down the hallway, which again was different from the one I had been living in before I found the medallion, and went into the bathroom. I caught a flash of something as I passed the mirror on the way to the john and turned to get a better fix on. "Oh my God!" I blurted. I touched my face to make sure it was really me that was now the American version of the super hot Mari-chan. Whatever I did, the person in the mirror did, too. Then I looked down. Tits! And nicely manicured feet!

I did my business and subsequently showered. After I had blow dried my hair, brushed my teeth and, I have to admit, staring at my new gorgeous self in the mirror, I took a tour of the house. One of the other bedrooms was devoted to images of Vishnu and I knelt again to give thanks for the favor he had just condescended to do for me.

There was a purse on my new dresser and it contained all the major credit cards and a driver's license with a photo of the new me and the name I had chosen to operate under. I turned on the tv, which wasn't the big screen HDTV I was used to before, but a 1980's vintage Sony model. There were a shitload fewer channels. It then struck me that I was also going to have to do without the internet I had greatly relied on since it would still be several years yet before it would hit the consumer level in a big way.  Shit. Can you say "withdrawal"?

What was REALLY missing was my guitar collection,  my amp and my pedal board. I was going to have to go out and buy all new equipment. That sucked because I normally hated going to guitar stores, where the employees weren't much better than your usual retail employee, except with a generally even more surly and supercilious attitude.

I went to my bank (for some reason I just knew which one it was) dressed in a simple outfit of a white blouse and new jeans and a pair of black heels. Sure enough, the folks who worked there knew who I was immediately. "Hi Miss Notohara! How are you today!" the teller chirped before I withdrew ten grand. I smiled my thanks to her and, after stuffing the wad of cash into my purse, I left.

I went to a local guitar shop and went nuts with my Visa card, blowing about $35,000 in 1988 dollars on musical gear. I had to go rent a U-Haul truck to move it all. The cool thing was that I was able to buy models that had long been unavailable to me in the 21st century, including some very colorful single pickup Charvels. Having to fetch the U-Haul was a hassle, but the worst part of it was not having the upper body and leg strength I had as a male any longer in moving heavy amp heads and cabs. Then I spent a while hooking it all up and jamming on it.

I also had to re-create my record collection and spent the better part of the next few days doing that and then listening to songs and learning how to play them.

I had an ulterior motive for choosing to land myself in 1988 in that persona and in that location, though. I'll talk about that in the next chapter.