She
had already found favorite places in the woods. There was a meadow
where she could sit on a fallen log and gaze across a thicket of
salal and huckleberry, where the forest sloped away toward Belltower.
There was a sandy spot by a creek where she thought she might scatter
Gram Peggy's ashes. And another meadow, farther south, riddled with
deer trails, where an abandoned woodshed sagged under a growth of
moss.
The
woodshed fascinated her. There was something inviting about the
cockeyed slant of the door. Surely there was nothing inside,
Catherine told herself; or only a cord of moldy firewood. But then
again there might be an old plough or spinning wheel, something she
could clean up and peddle to the antique shops in Belltower. Unless
this was somebody's property, in which case she would be stealing.
But she could at least
peek.
She
had this thought vaguely in mind Wednesday morning, her second week
in Belltower, when she packed a bag lunch and went wandering. It was
a warm day and she was sweating by the time she passed the
creek. She pressed on south, paused to tie her hair up off her neck,
hiked past the huckleberry thicket and on down to the woodshed
in its sunny meadow.
She
approached the door of the ancient structure, high-stepping through
berry-bush runners to avoid a stand of fireweed . . . then she
hesitated.
It
seemed to her she could hear faint motion inside.
Curiosity
killed the cat,
Gram
Peggy used to say. But she always added the less salutary
rider—
Satisfaction
brought it back.
Gram
Peggy had been a big believer in satisfied curiosity.
So
Catherine opened the creaking woodshed door and peered inside, where
a stack of newspapers had moldered for decades, and where something
hideous moved and spoke in the darkness.
How
did it feel to begin life over again, thirty years in the past?
Giddy,
Tom thought. Strange. Exhilarating.
And—more
often now—frightening.
It
wasn't clear to him when or why the fear had started. Maybe it had
been there all along, a subtler presence than now. Maybe it had
started when he moved into the house on the Post Road, a steady
counterpoint to all the raucous events since. Maybe he'd been born
with it.
But
it wasn't fear, exactly; it was a kind of systematic
disquiet
.
. . and he felt it most profoundly on a hot Thursday afternoon in
July, when he could have sworn, but couldn't prove, that somebody
followed him from Lindner's Radio Supply to Larry Millstein's
apartment.
The
day had gone well. Since he'd taken this job Tom had turned in enough
reliable work that Max mainly left him alone. The cavernous back room
of Lindner's had begun to feel homey and familiar. Hot days like
this, he tipped open the high leaded windows to let the alley breezes
through. He was working on a Fisher amplifier a customer had brought
in; the output tube had flashed over and one of the power-supply
electrolytics was leaking. The capacitors were oil-filled, the kind
eliminated under an EPA edict—some years in the future—for their
PCB content. The danger, at least at this end of the manufacturing
process, was far from mortal. At lunch, Max asked him why he kept the
fan so close to his work. "I don't like the smell," Tom
said.
Toxins
aside, Tom had developed a respect for these old American radios and
amplifiers. The up-market models were simple, well built, and
substantial—the sheer weight of them was sometimes astonishing.
Iron-core transformers, steel chassis, oak cabinets, a pleasure to
work with. The job was underpaid and offered absolutely no
opportunity for advancement, but for Tom it functioned as
therapy: something pleasant to do with his hands and a paycheck at
the end of the week.
And
still—long since the novelty should have worn off— he would look
up from his soldering at the calendar on the wall, where the year
1962 was inscribed over a picture of a chunky woman in a lime-green
one-piece bathing suit, and he would feel a dizzy urge to laugh out
loud.
What
was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of
youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled
granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as
implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank. And yet,
here
he was
—
almost
thirty years down a road that shouldn't exist; in the past, where
nobody can visit.
He
was no younger than he had been and he was nothing like immortal. But
time had been suborned and that made him happy.
"You're
always looking at that calendar," Max said. "I think you're
in love with that girl." "Head over heels," Tom said.
"That's
the calendar from Mirvish's. They use the same picture every year.
Every summer since 1947, the same girl in the same bathing suit.
She's probably an old lady now."
"She's
a time traveler," Tom said. "She's always young." "And
you're a fruitcake," Max explained. "Please, go back to
work."
Certain
other implications of this time travel business had not escaped him.
It
was 1962 in New York. Therefore it was 1962 all over the country—all
over the world, in fact; therefore it was 1962 in Belltower,
Washington, and both his parents were alive.
Somewhere
in the Great Unwinding—perhaps at step number forty-eight or
sixty-three or one hundred twenty-one in the tunnel between the Post
Road and Manhattan—a log truck had swerved backward up a mountain
road; a bright blue sedan had vaulted an escarpment onto the highway;
two bodies had shuddered to life as the dashboard peeled away from
the seats and the engine sprang back beneath the hood.
In
1962, in Belltower, a young GP named Winter had recently opened a
residential practice serving the middle-class neighborhood north of
town. His wife had borne him two sons; the younger, Tommy, had his
fourth birthday coming up in November.
They
are all living in the big house on Poplar Street, Tom thought, with
Daddy's offices downstairs and living quarters up. If I went there, I
could see them. Big as fife.
He
pictured them: his father in a black Sunday suit or medical whites,
his mother in a floral print dress, and between them, maybe a
yard high in baby Keds, something unimaginable: himself.
One
morning when Joyce was off doing restaurant work and he was home
feeling a little lonely, he picked up the telephone and dialed the
long-distance operator. He said he wanted to place a call to
Belltower, Washington, to Dr. Winter's office on Poplar Street.
The phone rang three times, a distant buzzing, and a woman answered.
My
mother's voice.
It
was a paralyzing thought. What could he possibly say?
But
it wasn't his mother. It was his father's nurse, Miss Trudy
Valasquez, whom he dimly remembered: an immense Hispanic woman with
orthopedic shoes and peppermint breath. Dr. Winter was out on call,
she said, and who
was
this,
anyway?
"It's
nothing urgent," Tom said. "I'll try again later."
Much
later. Maybe never. There was something perverse about the act. It
felt wrong, to disturb that innocent household with even as much
as an anonymous call—too tangled and Oedipal, too entirely strange.
Then
he thought,
But
I have to call them. I have to warn them.
Warn
them not to go traveling up the coast highway on a certain date some
fifteen years from now.
Warn
them, in order to save their lives. So that Tom could go to med
school, as his father had insisted; so that he wouldn't meet Barbara,
wouldn't marry her, wouldn't divorce her, wouldn't buy a house up the
Post Road, wouldn't travel into the past, wouldn't make a phone call,
wouldn't warn them, wouldn't save their lives.
Would,
perhaps, loop infinitely between these possibilities, as ghostly as
Schroedinger's cat.
This
was the past, Tom told himself, and the past
must
be
immutable—including the death of his parents. Nothing else made
sense. If the past was fluid and could be changed, then it was up to
Tom to change it: warn airliners about bombs, waylay Oswald at the
Book Depository, clear the airport lobbies before the gunmen
arrived ...
an
impossible, unbearable burden of moral responsibility.
For
the sake of sense and for the sake of sanity, the past must be a
static landscape. If he told Pan Am a plane was going to go down,
they wouldn't believe him. If he flew to Dallas to warn the
President, he'd miss his plane or suffer a heart attack at the
luggage carousel. He didn't know what unseen hand would orchestrate
these events, only that the alternative was even less plausible. If
he tried to change history, he would fail . . . that was all
there was to it. Dangerous even to
experiment.
But
he thought about that call often. Thought about warning them.
Thought about saving their lives.
It
was hardly urgent. For now and for many years to come they were
alive, happy, young, safer than they knew.
But
as the date drew closer—if he stayed here, if he lived that
long—then, Tom thought, he might
have
to
make the call, risk or no risk ...
or
know they had died when he could have saved them.
Maybe
that was when the fear began.
He
slept with these thoughts, woke chastened, and rode the bus to
Lindner's. He regarded the girl on the calendar with a new sobriety.
Today her expression seemed enigmatic, clouded.
"You're
still in love with her," Max observed. "Look at her face,
Max. She knows something." "She knows you're a lunatic,"
Max said.
He
lost himself in his work. The day's biggest surprise was a call from
Larry Millstein: apologies for the incident at the party and would he
come over that afternoon? Meet Joyce at the apartment, the three of
them could go to dinner, make peace. Tom accepted, then phoned Joyce
to make sure she was free. "I already talked to Lawrence,"
she said. "I think he's reasonably sincere. Plus, you're too
popular these days. Avoiding you is beginning to interfere with his
social life."
"Should
I be nice? Is it worth the trouble?"
"Be
nice. He's neurotic and he can be mean sometimes. But if he were a
total loss I would never have slept with him in the first place."
"That's
reassuring."
"You
both like jazz. Talk about music. On second thought, don't."
He
left the shop at six. It was a warm afternoon, the buses were
crowded; he decided to walk. The weather had been fine for days. The
sky was blue, the air was reasonably clean, and he had no reason to
feel uneasy.
Nevertheless,
the uneasiness began as soon as he stepped out of Lindner's front
door and it intensified with every step he took.
At
first he dismissed it. He'd been through some novel experiences in
the last few months and a little paranoia, at this stage, was perhaps
not too surprising. But he couldn't dismiss the uneasiness or the
thoughts it provoked, memories he had neglected: of the tunnel, of
the machine bugs, of their warning.
He
recalled the rubble in the sub-basement of the building near Tompkins
Square. Someone had been there before him, someone dangerous. But Tom
had passed that way safely, and his anonymity would be guaranteed in
a city as vast as New York—wouldn't it?
He
told himself so. Nevertheless, as he walked east on Eighth toward
Millstein's shabby East Village neighborhood, his vague anxiety
resolved into a solid conviction that he was being followed. He
paused across the street from Millstein's tenement building and
turned back. Puerto Rican women moved between the stoops and
storefronts; three children crossed the street at a fight. There were
two Anglos visible: a large, pale woman steering a baby stroller and
a middle-aged man with a brown paper bag tucked under his arm. So who
in this tableau was stalking him?