Shifter

SHIFTER (Part 2)

By Dolphin Dan

*** WARNING ***

This story contains fairly graphic descriptions of sexual acts between consenting adults of the same gender. If you are under age, or it is illegal for you to view such material, or this theme is objectionable to you, please do not continue.

[OUR STORY: Zack is a gay college-age student who is not very popular or attractive, and who tends to fantasize about straight boys he's acquainted with. While dreaming about a classmate named Taylor, Zack evidently regressed a short distance back in time to the year 2002. Later, while fantasizing about Jimmy, a co-worker, Zack found himself in another situation in which he realized he spent a few hours in the year 1988, having sex with someone who appeared (to him, at least) to be the Jimmy he knew. Zack has no explanation for the phenomenon, and assumes it was just a fluke...though he doesn't know for sure.]

I started college. I lived in a dorm with two other students, Wes and Corey; they were nice enough guys. The weather turned crisp and cold and the leaves began to turn gold. I didn't get much romantic action. I was still too chicken to actually come out publicly, though I had thought of quietly joining the Gay Lesbian & Bisexual Students Alliance on campus. Except for the unusual time-shifting fantasies, Taylor and Jimmy were both largely forgotten. Their replacement was a guy named Dustin.

Dustin was in my Western Civilizations class. He was from down south somewhere and talked with a thick twang, but the chicks loved him. He was a little on the short side, and had a mane of shaggy blondish hair, slightly curly. He had beautiful brown eyes and wore a scruffy little goatee. He was the kind of guy who wore Abercrombie & Fitch type clothes with hemp necklaces and Birkenstocks, though he wasn't really a hippie. He was obviously hetero; I had no illusions that he liked guys. But I definitely liked him. I talked to him a little bit and had dinner with him once at the dorm dining hall. He was from Atlanta, and wanted to study architecture when it came time to declare a major. Dustin was cool. I quickly fixated on him.

One thing I found in college was that your masturbation opportunities are severely complicated by roommates. I didn't feel comfortable doing it in bed, with one guy in a bunk above me and another across the room; I tended to make noise when I came, and wasn't confident I could be quiet enough not to disturb my roommates. I began to learn their schedules, however. On Thursdays there was a half-hour gap between two of my classes during which I knew Wes and Corey were both in class. Thus, Thursday at 10:30 AM became my ritual jerk-off time.

One day in early October I came home from class, dropped my backpack on the cluttered floor, closed the Venetian blinds looking out onto the quad, and began to undress. These days I so looked forward to my jerk-off time that I would start getting erect at about 10:00, at the end of my class, and fill my mind with pleasant visions of attractive boys touching me in very familiar ways. Today, as was usual, Dustin was on my mind. I stripped down to my underwear and crawled into bed. I set a stack of paper napkins--stolen from the dining hall--on the milk-crate night-table next to me. It kind of sucked having to masturbate so early in the day--I was used to late-night sessions--but I had to take what opportunities I could get. I pulled down my boxer briefs and took myself in hand. I slowly stroked my balls, moved my hand upward on my shaft and across my head, and started to construct a fantasy. I imagined myself in a 69 with Dustin. I could almost feel his lips on my shaft, and his pulsating hardness sliding in and out of my own mouth. I became aware of an odor, a musky scent, like the hint of cumin powder. Even in my limited experience I recognized it. When I was a sophomore in high school I had fooled around a bit with my friend Scott, and I had given him a very brief blow job. His groin had smelled like that. It was an arousing smell.

When I opened my eyes all I could see was a faintly flesh-colored darkness in front of me. A pair of hands was clamped around the back of my thighs, and my dick was enveloped by a warm, glorious wetness. From my other vivid fantasies I immediately recognized that sensation as being given head.

A hard dick was thrusting its way down my throat. I could taste the salty flavor of what I guessed was precum on its tip. With my tongue I endeavored to impart as much pleasure to Dustin as I possibly could. I knew it was him. It felt like him. He couldn't speak of course, with my penis in his mouth, but he was moaning in what was definitely pleasure. I took him out of my mouth briefly and stroked his saliva-coated rod with my hand. He shuddered. He worked harder on me. It felt absolutely glorious.

His hands were moving upward now, caressing my butt cheeks. A moment later I felt the tip of one of Dustin's fingers enter my ass. I was surprised how suddenly good it felt. I moaned extra-loudly, to make sure he understood that I liked that. He probed deeper. I wasn't tremendously interested in anal action, but a little stimulation went a long way. Figuring that Dustin was doing to me what he would want me to do to him, my hands moved upward to his own ass. I found the tight little chamber that flexed slightly under the pressure of my finger. I was surprised how easy it went in. My finger was in Dustin's butt up to the middle knuckle.

He grunted, and his whole body went rigid. I guessed the pressure on his prostate was what did it. His penis exploded like a bomb in my mouth. For several glorious seconds my mouth was filled with his salty sperm, and his butt clenched so tight on my finger that it felt like it would tear it off. Then I finally sailed over the edge myself. I fired eight or ten hot bursts down Dustin's throat. He did not take his finger out of my ass; he wiggled it provocatively as I came, trying to milk my prostate for everything it was worth. Then our bodies relaxed. We withdrew our fingers--and our dicks--from each other, and lay panting on the bed. My whole body was full of a very gratifying quivering sensation.

"That was so groovy, man," said Dustin. His thick Southern accent made his voice all the sexier.

Groovy? What did he mean, groovy?

In the back of my mind I had been preparing myself for another time-shift, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw. The bed we were on was very different than my bed in the dorm. For one thing, it had the ugliest bedspread I had ever seen in my life. It was brown and gold with a disgusting pattern that looked like someone had spewed puke all over it. I raised my head off the pillow. The room I was in had wallpaper that wasn't much better-looking than the bedspread. The curtains were turquoise. The television, across the room, was set inside a wooden cabinet that was made to look like a piece of furniture. There was a table, and clothes scattered about the room. I had the feeling we were in a big city, but I wasn't sure where--or when.

Dustin lay on the bed next to me, his head down by my feet. Every time he breathed in his skin pulled up against his ribs. He had a little bit of hair on the top of his chest but not much. Yet he looked very different. His goatee had been shaved off. And he had sideburns from hell. Big, paisley-shaped amoebas of shaggy hair crawling down his cheeks.

My eyes grew wide. There was only one decade that looked anything as tacky as this.

The '70s.

"Ah think Ah love you, man," said Dustin.

"That was good," I agreed. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around at the pile of clothes, wondering which were mine.

"Ah mean it. You're great. Ah'd come down from Toronto any time to see you."

I got out of bed and pawed through the clothes on the floor. There was a pair of pants--bell bottoms. I really hoped those were Dustin's. There was a polyester shirt with a huge collar, a plain white undershirt, and what looked like a dress shirt and tie. There were some plain white boxers that looked like my size. I'm a bit chubby, and Dustin was thin; I surmised they were mine. I put them on. Something he'd said triggered a question in my head. "You're from Toronto?" I asked him.

He raised his head. He was lying spread-eagled on the bed, like a naked, gay, sideburn-wearing Christ waiting to be nailed to the cross. His large penis, now limp, lay against his belly. "Of course," he said, sounding as Southern as ever. "You know where Ah'm from."

"You don't sound like you're from Toronto."

"Why, 'cuz Ah don't say 'aboot?'" He laughed and laid his head back down. "Christ, Ah could use a cigarette."

This wasn't Dustin. He may have looked like him and talked like him--and, for all I knew, fucked like him--but it wasn't the Dustin who went to my college.

I went to the window and drew the curtains. I gathered we were in a hotel room. There was a small balcony outside. Beyond it I saw a forest of buildings I vaguely recognized. Two, in particular. They were two large monolithic towers stretching toward the sky. The World Trade Center towers--the same ones that were destroyed in 2001. I was in New York City.

"Don't you love me?" said Dustin.

"Of course I love you, Dustin," I told him, being careful to call him by his name.

He smiled. "That's good. Can we meet again? Ah know it might not be for a couple of months. But Ah really want to see you."

I smiled back. "Of course, sweetie."

I was intensely curious about my surroundings. Knowing the previous experiences, I realized I could find myself back in my own time at any moment. I went to the bathroom. It was very small. The containers of soap and shampoo on the ledge underneath the mirror looked very different than they would have in my own time. But I looked the same. The same chubby old Zack, with his long hair and piercing blue eyes. I didn't have sideburns from hell. But it occurred to me that Dustin--or whoever Dustin really was--might see me as whoever HE wanted to see. Could it be that simple?

I stepped out of the bathroom. Dustin was still lying across the bed. I went to the door. It had an old-style brass knob. I pulled it, opened it slightly, and looked out. A long corridor with similar doors stretched down on either side. The wallpaper was atrocious, the carpet even worse. At the far end I saw a cleaning woman with a cart. This was definitely a hotel, probably a pretty luxurious one.

At my feet, on the ugly carpet, sat a newspaper. Greedily I snatched it up, yanked it inside and closed the door.

"Mah wife can't ever know about this," Dustin said. "I know you hate meeting in hotels like this, but we don't have a choice."

I unfolded the paper. It was the New York Times. My eyes zeroed in on the dateline. TUESDAY, MAY 6, 1975.

SNAP.

Back in my dorm room. Panting heavily. In my left hand, the hand I typically ejaculate into, was a mushy wad of paper napkins soaking through with something wet and warm. The clock said 10:38. It had been 10:35 when I started jacking off. I'd been gone three minutes, which was about the average time it took me to come to orgasm if I was trying to hurry.

I wrapped up the cum-soaked napkins in a few other drier napkins from the stack next to my bed, dropped it into the wastebasket, shrugged on my underwear and immediately dove for a pad and paper. I had to write down everything I recalled. I took a page of frantic notes. I described the bedspread, the clothes on the floor, Dustin's exact words as near as I could recall them, the newspaper, the date, the weather, the World Trade Center towers, everything.

As I wrote I noticed a strange smell. It smelled like shit. I sniffed my right hand. The smell grew stronger. It was especially strong on my middle finger. That was the finger I had thrust into Dustin's butt.

This was the most startling revelation of all. It was physical evidence. This was not just in my head. Something had really happened.

For a moment I thought I must have been wrong. I couldn't remember being here in my room masturbating, but the evidence suggested I had been. It was entirely possible that during those three minutes I didn't remember I had stuck my right middle finger up my own ass, but it wasn't likely for two reasons. First, as I wasn't much into anal stimulation, I couldn't remember the last time I'd done that to myself. Second, it was my RIGHT hand. That was the hand I masturbated with. I didn't switch hands; I couldn't get myself to orgasm with my left hand. And in this instance I could prove to myself I'd been using my right hand, because my left hand had been holding the napkins that I came into. How, then, had it happened?

One explanation made sense, at the same time as it seemed patently impossible. For several minutes--perhaps half an hour or so--I really HAD been in a hotel room in New York City in 1975, and I'd been having sex with someone, some person unknown. That person was not Dustin. It was some man from Toronto, who was married, and having an affair with another man. The dynamic of the scene I'd witnessed certainly seemed to suggest it was some kind of secret infidelity. Whoever it was, he had probably seen me as the man he thought he was with. I had just lived half an hour of someone else's life.

Had this happened the other times too? When I thought I was fantasizing about being with Taylor, was I in fact inside the mind of some other person, who was having sex with a male friend after a party in the fall of 2002? And had I been in the house of some rich person from Los Angeles in 1988 when I thought I was with Jimmy?

These revelations began to give me a headache when I thought about them too much. I had no explanation for any of it, except that I was shifting in time, and whatever triggered it was connected strongly to my libido. I quietly put my notes away in a drawer. I didn't want any of my roommates to find them.

I was certain now that, whatever the phenomenon was, it was going to happen again. Only this time I would be ready.

From that point on I started to construct a log, a journal. I was never sure when the time shifts were going to happen, so I figured it was best to keep track of everything. Before I masturbated, I wrote down the date and time, and then noted the time when I finished. If I did shift again, I was determined to find a clock or some way of measuring time that was endemic to that reality, and then compare when I got back.

I also began to compile a list of commonalities among my three experiences. Time didn't seem to be a factor. The first (Taylor) had happened in the middle of the night. The second was in the late evening, and the third in the late morning. I wondered if there was some commonality with things I ate or drank on those days. I certainly didn't drink alcohol or take drugs before any of those experiences. I'd have a beer now and again at a party, but I wasn't a drinker by any means. What, then, were the common threads?

I tried to work out a pattern among the experiences. Fourteen years, three months and an odd number of days had elapsed between experience two and experience one. Thirteen years, two months and eleven days elapsed between experience three and experience two. But they were all getting further back in the past. I wondered if I could predict where I'd end up next. Thirteen or fourteen years from 1975 would put me back sometime in the early 1960s. I wondered what that would look like. How far back would I go?

I gave up my crush on Dustin pretty quickly. In fact, the more I got to know him, the more I realized what a complete asshole he was. He was very vain and arrogant. In late October he began going out with Missy, one of my good friends. He treated her like shit. She totally fell for him, and he dumped her, but didn't even have the decency to inform her; it got back to her that he was kissing some other girl at a party, and she was devastated. After that I didn't care much about Dustin. Strangely, no one else from around campus really took his place. My mind regressed. I began thinking about Taylor again. I had bookmarked the WouldYouBangThis.com page where he had his profile. In November I started going there again. He hadn't changed anything, and probably hadn't been on line at this site in several months, but his pictures were still up, including the shirtless one that had attracted me in the first place. I wasn't much thinking about time-shifting anymore. I was thinking that I was very lonely.

I went back to Vermont for Thanksgiving break. It was bitterly cold. On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, my friend Jake took me to a party thrown by some people from my old school. By complete chance, Taylor was there. "Oh, hey, Zack," he said, but that was all. He looked different. He'd grown a goatee now, and his hair was even longer, now ponytail-length. That should have attracted me to him more, but strangely it didn't. He had a girlfriend now, Gwen. Midway through the party--after I'd already had several beers--I saw them sitting on the couch in the living room, making out like there was no tomorrow. I had no right to feel hurt, but I did. It was like a knife stabbing into me. I found Jake. "I think I want to go home," I said, exaggerating the amount I'd had to drink. I didn't want to see Taylor suck face with some chick.

Late that night, I got out my pad and pen--now second-nature to me--and set it next to my bed. I marked down the time, 1:45 AM. I sat on my bed in the darkness, dressed only in my underwear, for a long time. I wondered if I had really had sex with someone when I thought I was doing Taylor. If I had, it had certainly been good. I thought again of the sounds he'd made as he was coming. I grew erect. I reached under the waistband of my boxer briefs and started stroking.

I was aroused by my thoughts of Taylor, but at the same time I felt hostile toward him. In real life I would never use sex to hurt anyone, but in fantasy you can push the edges a bit. I did not often fantasize about anal sex, but tonight I did, and I was the giver rather than the recipient. I imagined Taylor on the bed underneath me, and me pumping my dick in and out of his butthole. I did not want it to be painful for him, but neither would Taylor mistake that, at least for a few minutes, I was in charge. I clutched his shoulders. "You're not to touch her again," I said, continuing my rhythm. "You want me, Taylor. Only me."

"I want you," he replied. His hair was back to the length I preferred it.

"Say it."

"I only want you, Zack."

"Do you love me?"

"I love you, Zack. I only love you."

But now there was a strange creaking noise, like the groaning of metallic joints. I could hear rain pattering down a windowsill. It hadn't been raining a moment ago. I had shifted again. I was in a small room, a dirty room. It was dark but I could see that part of the wall was crumbling. Rain was sheeting down a set of grimy panes. Taylor still lay underneath me. His legs were up over my shoulders. We were on some kind of iron-framed bed. It creaked loudly with every stroke. The only light in the room was a single candle, in an old tea cup on a battered wooden table. There were clothes scattered about the floor, but it was too dark to see what they looked like.

A kind of angry pleasure was building in my groin. I was getting very close. "Say it again!" I demanded.

"Ich liebe dich!" Taylor replied. "Ich liebe dich!"

"WHAT?" The question came too late. I was already coming. I thrust hard. Taylor winced. My dick erupted. I gasped, and grabbed the dirty iron bed railing to steady myself. It was one of the hardest cums I'd ever had. "Ich liebe dich," he kept repeating, softer now, as I shot into him. "Ich liebe dich, Zack. Ich liebe dich." He put his legs down. Then he drew his arms around my back and pulled me close to him. My dick slid out of his butt. I felt cold, and strangely scared. This was nothing like any of the other experiences. This was scary.

"Why are you talking that way?"

He said something else to me, words I didn't understand. It was his voice, the same voice I recall, but he was speaking German. He kissed me. I ran my fingers through his hair, but it didn't feel familiar. His hair was shaved very short, almost military-style. "What happened to your hair?" I asked him.

"Vas?" It didn't sound like he understood. He shifted around on the bed. I realized he was pulling up his shorts. He patted me on the back, making a slapping sound, and then wiggled out from under me and out of bed. "Vas bringen sie?" he said. He began pawing through the clothes on the floor. He reached up and moved the candle closer to the edge of the table so he could see what he was doing. In the mess of clothes I could see a pair of boots and olive-green fatigues. Lying on the table was an automatic rifle. But Taylor was more interested in the khaki haversack that he unearthed. He opened it and took out something wrapped in newspaper. It was a loaf of bread. He smiled. "Danke!" he said. He kept pawing. There were other treasures. There was a bottle of some kind of liquor, and a tin of butter. At seeing this Taylor's eyes lit up. "Ausgeseichnet!" he gushed. He went over to the bed and kissed me on the forehead. "Viel dank," he said.

He certainly looked different. His hair had mostly been shaved off, and there were little scabs and scars on his scalp, as if the job had been done very roughly. And his body was dirty.

"What year is this?" I asked him.

He obviously didn't understand me. He rooted through the clothes again and soon found what had to be his own clothes. They were worn and threadbare. A military-style jacket had holes in it on the collar and shoulders, as if some kind of rank insignia had been torn off. He quickly put on some deteriorating shoes, then gathered up the booty and kissed me again. "Next week?" he said, the words heavily accented.

"Uh...yeah. Next week."

Then he left the small room, and left me alone. I immediately scrambled out of bed. I seemed to be me--I still had my trademark beer gut and long hair--but the clothes on the floor were obviously those of some kind of soldier. I put them on. Near the automatic rifle on the table something glimmered. I picked it up. A pair of military dog tags jangled.

I held the tags close to the candle. The little raised letters in the metal spelled, RAYMOND E CALABRESE, CPL USA 2408477723.

I was mystified. I'd never heard of Raymond E. Calabrese, but obviously that's who I was.

I looked out the window. I couldn't see anything. There was no indication of what year this was or where I was, though I was beginning to nurse a suspicion. I threw on the heavy coat and picked up the automatic rifle. I'd never handled a gun before and wouldn't know how to go about loading or firing it even if I wanted to. I slung its strap over my shoulder. It was very heavy. A little reticent, I opened the door to the small room and peered out.

I saw a darkened hallway of an old house. Another door was open. Through it I saw a woman, washing a spindly baby standing in a porcelain wash basin. There were no lights, only candles. She looked away as soon as she saw me.

I was on a second level. I tramped down the stairs and went out the front door. When I got out to the street I suddenly understood.

The room I'd been in was in an old row house. The street was cobblestone, and the block across from it was complete rubble. Beyond it I saw a great Gothic cathedral--also in ruins. In the streets across the rubble-filled block I saw several Army jeeps and trucks. The men walking around them were in GI uniforms, just like me. Obviously this was the scene of some war, but it appeared to be over now. There were a few street signs left. They bore Gothic lettering and I couldn't exactly read them.

A jeep rumbled by in the cobblestone street. Two of the men in it saluted when they saw me. I saluted back. Only then did I think to stop.

"Hey! Wait! You guys there, wait!"

They understood me. The jeep squeaked to a halt. I ran to catch up. "Yes, sir?" said one of the men. I guessed he must have been a private, if I as a corporal was senior to him.

"What's today?" I asked. "What's the exact date today?"

"Sir?" He looked at me quizzically.

"Tell me the exact date, month, day and year," I replied. "That's an order."

Two of the men in the jeep looked at each other with blank expressions. The man I'd spoken to looked back. "It's November 14, 1945," he replied. "Is there a problem, sir?"

SNAP!

I was back sitting on my bed in the darkness. The warmth and quiet told me it was my parents' house in Vermont. I had my hand around my dick, but it was soft. I had cum in my underwear. I looked over at the clock. 1:50 AM. In real time I'd been gone only five minutes. Or had I been gone at all?

I switched on the light, wiped off my hand with Kleenexes, and grabbed the pen and paper.

I hadn't been prepared for so radical a shift. Indeed, where the others had been fairly interesting, this one was disturbing on several levels. I wondered if it had to do with my foul mood and my animosity toward Taylor. The memory of the war-ruined city sent a shudder up my spine. I wondered what city it was, Nuremburg or Berlin or someplace else. I was certain the young man I'd been with had been Taylor, but his clothes, his hair and inability to speak much English told me who he must have been in real life. He was some young German man who had evidently had a sexual relationship with a U.S. soldier who was part of the occupation force in Germany after World War II. I had no doubt that Calabrese had been a real person. I wondered what the bread, butter and liquor were for. Were they gifts for the young German? Or were they payment for his sexual services? I certainly hoped it was the former. It would stand to reason that the local people in Germany would have a hard time getting food and supplies after the devastation of the war, and there must have been bartering going on between them and the American soldiers. It was true I felt little emotion when I was fucking Taylor, in marked contrast to the pleasant emotions of the first time shift, to 2002. It was like Calabrese did not care about that boy. I didn't like that feeling at all. I felt shamed and dirty. I shuddered. This had not been a pleasant shift. I began to wonder if this "gift" wasn't such a gift after all, at least not all the time.

I toyed with the idea of finding out about Raymond Calabrese. This shift provided the first irrefutable evidence that my shifts involved inhabiting the mind and perhaps the body--or certainly the persona--of another person. If Calabrese was in the U.S. Army, there would have been a record of him somewhere. But I wasn't sure I wanted to know. If I did find out something about him, the truth might be unpleasant.

The next day, Sunday, I typed the name into a Google search engine. I was a little nervous--scared of what I might find--but I did it anyway. I brought up only one hit. It was for a site called Familyhistoryregistry.com. When I clicked on the page it was some kind of family tree. One of the platforms on the tree had a notation:

CALABRESE, RAYMOND EARL B. NEW YORK, NY 10 JUL 1924 M. -NONE- D. DUSSELDORF, GERMANY, 9 MAY 1946

My eyes grew wide. I felt the blood drain out of my head. Just staring at the words DUSSELDORF, GERMANY made me almost sick to my stomach. Calabrese had been real. And in those days, there weren't a lot of reasons why a 21-year-old American from New York with an Italian name would end up in Germany shortly after World War II. He had to have been in the Army. There was no other explanation.

I wonder what he died of. I quickly decided I didn't want to know any more about Raymond Calabrese. Being him during one of his most intimate moments was enough for me. Quietly I began to hope that my time shifting would stop. If I had a few more like this last one, I wasn't sure I could take it.

*** TO BE CONTINUED ***

Stories By This Author:

Last Days in the Dorm /nifty/gay/college/last-days-in-the-dorm

Lust In Iraq /nifty/gay/military/lust-in-iraq/

Rip the Jacker /nifty/bisexual/masturbation/rip-the-jacker/