The Bridge in the Basement

Henry woke up everyday feeling the same. What did it matter, anyhow? Today was day 32 of the quarantine and there was really nothing to look forward to. He checked his calendar to find out what day the CERB emergency funds would come in the mail. 10 days. Those pizza Pops better last a bit longer. Henry was rationing his frozen food like Matt Damon was rationing his potatoes in "The Martian."

Henry looked around all the rooms in his one storey bungalow. Being a single man was no way to spend the quarantine. He had a hard enough time getting dates on Tinder. Now, there were no physical meet ups, just the occasional questionable zoom session. They couldn't make up for the real thing.

Out of sheer boredom, Henry decided to look at his old basketball cards from the late 90s. Perhaps those familiar faces would bring him comfort: Reggie Miller, Scottie Pippen, Mugsy Bogues. They were all preserved in their athletic primes in full-on Topps glory. Why had he spent so much money on these cards in his youth? He would have been better off investing in cheap stocks to see if he could watch them grow. Instead, here he was, living the life of a man-child, and not in the Shawn Kemp way.

Henry was about to reach for the last of his Topps boxes when his foot felt something funny. He hadn't been in this room in his basement a lot. In fact, it wasn't really a room. It was really a storage space for things he didn't need anymore. He decided to put the basketball cards down and look at the slimy substance that had now engulfed his right foot.

He soon discovered that this was not a substance at all but a black (really, a green) hole of sorts. The more he tried to pull his leg out, the more he got sucked into the abyss. Five minutes later, his entire lower torso was now in the disgusting hole and he weighed his options. He could try to scream for help. No one had really been around his house for 2 months now, and some of that time was even before the quarantine. He decided that he was just going to dive in and see what world awaited him. "What a tough way to die," Henry thought to himself.

Henry woke up 8 hours later. Was it really 8 hours? It was hard to tell. He got up and looked around his house. It looked like his house but it seemed really different. The paint on it was fresh and the furniture pieces were, how should he put this, classier?

He checked the outside of his own door. 57 Summerville Street. "Yep, I'm still in the suburbs of Toronto," he thought. But he knew something was off. He looked around at the cars. Boxy. Every car looked boxy to him.

He ran to the nearest convenience store and he suddenly knew what was wrong. The headlines read: "April 21, 1997." Why in the world would he get sucked into a time portal that brought him to one of the weirdest years in his life?

Henry had a lot of problems. The first was that he didn't have any 1997 currency on him. He was able to somehow bring his wallet into the time portal but all he had was about 40 dollars in "futuristic" bills and his debit cards. There was no way the scanners would be able to detect a bank account that would have been set up 3 years later, in the year 2000. He had to be creative.

The other problem he had was that the family that lived in the house he was in wasn't his own. Henry had purchased his home in 2015, and he was pretty sure that if anyone saw him, they would call 911 right away. Henry looked at all the things that had made the timehop with him: useless wallet. Smartphone with a limited charge (42 percent, no charger), and what was this? A basketball card? One basketball card: Scottie Pippen in all his 1997 glory. At that moment in time, Henry stopped feeling sorry for himself and went to Tim Horton's to find a used coffee cup. He then hitched a ride to the Kipling subway station without telling anyone he was from the future.

Henry found a homeless shelter that took him in. He begged for money in the mornings and tried to be as frugal with it as possible. He averaged 50 dollars a day for the month of May, 1997.

By May 30th, he had saved roughly 1,000 dollars after deducting his expenses for food and hygiene. He knew exactly what to do. He found a bookie that gave him 20 to 1 odds on a very particular bet: The Chicago Bulls would win the 1997 NBA Finals in 6 games.

Once Steve Kerr hit that jumper to seal the win over the Utah Jazz, Henry went into beast mode. He got himself a decent apartment in downtown Toronto with half of his winnings (half of 20 grand) and set aside 5,000 for his expenses. He then set the remaining 5 grand for a legendary investment streak.

By the year 2000, Henry still had not found a way back to the year 2020. But he had turned 5,000 into 5 million, thanks to his near-photographic memory of sports. He didn't need to remember much. He just needed to bet big on playoff games and bet the farm on NBA finals games. He knew that the LA Lakers, for example, would rally in the 4th quarter of the 2000 Western Conference Finals and take it in 7 games against the Portland Trailblazers, and of all people...Scottie Pippen.

Sometimes people would ask him about this weird-looking brick in his bedroom. It seemed rather futuristic, even if it didn't do anything. Of course, the charger for the Samsung A5 would not be invented for another 17 years, give or take, so he was stuck there with a brick.

He really didn't mind. He had a new identity. He had more money than he actually needed. He spent most of his time trying to think about moving away from Toronto, to prevent him from running into the 19 year old version of himself.