More Stories from the Twilight Zone (2 page)

“Who's Becca?”

He frowned. After twenty-eight years of marriage he didn't always understand Penny's humor. He opened his mouth to say something caustic, but she was distracted by the TV. “I thought they'd be at Arlington by now,” she said. “These state funerals seem to get longer and longer.”

He thought it an odd comment, but he shook his head. “After all this time it still saddens me.”

“Well, he lived a long life.”

“Long? He was cut down in his prime!”

“Don't be silly, Herb. You haven't made sense since I walked into the room. Are you still asleep?”

“Me? You're the one who pretended she didn't know her own daughter.”

Her face became a rictus of pain. “That's—how can you be so cruel? Don't you think I'd have given you children if I could?”

He was alarmed then. She'd never taken a joke this far. “Penny, are you all right?”

She dropped the basket on the floor and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. He heard her crying.

The television commentator's deep voice broke in on his confusion. “For those of you who just joined us, you're watching continuous coverage of the funeral services of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, former president of the United States, who died Thursday at the age of ninety-two.”

Herb saw then that the vehicles in the procession were all late models. Some of the people lining the pavement were using cell phones—science fiction back in 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated.
And the distinctive boxed H was missing from the corner of the screen. It wasn't the History Channel.

 

Alone in the living room, he wondered if Penny had guessed the truth, and that he was still asleep. When he tried to change the channel, the remote was different, with none of the buttons in the same place. He had to study it a moment to figure it out.

The funeral procession was on every channel, a live broadcast. He wanted to check the satellite stations, but couldn't find that feature on the remote, and then he noticed the satellite box was missing from the entertainment center. He turned off the set, feeling woozy. It was Sunday—at least it had been when he'd gone to sleep. He tried to remember if he'd been drinking Saturday night and was still under the influence, but he wasn't much of a drinker. They'd spent a quiet evening at home watching a movie. On satellite.

Other things had changed. There were no pictures of Becca, her husband Rick, or their kids anywhere in the room. The new carpet they'd had installed last spring had been replaced by the old one, stained in places and showing wear.

Practical joke? An elaborate one if so, and he couldn't picture his wife planning or cooperating in any such scheme. She considered that kind of humor mean-spirited and in poor taste.

No, he was dreaming. But in the past, he'd always awakened the moment he realized it.

Sinister thought. He was fifty-two, in relatively good shape for his age, although he knew he should eat better and exercise more. He and Penny had discussed retiring before they were too old and sick to enjoy it. The last time he'd had his cholesterol checked it had tested borderline high, and for a few weeks afterward he'd eaten a lot of oatmeal and taken walks, then had slipped back into comfortable old bad habits. Was this a stroke? Or more frightening yet, the onset of Alzheimer's? His father had lingered for
years in a nursing home, and in the end recognized no one in his own family.

If it was dementia, which things were right and which were wrong? Had JFK died in 1963 or 2009? Had Herb imagined he was a father and grandfather, or was he hallucinating that he was neither?

He shook his head. If he was losing his grip, it wasn't from age or hardened arteries. That started with misplacing things, like one's eyeglasses, and became serious when one forgot one wore them. But then, how could he be sure how long this had been going on? Maybe what had seemed like a short nap had actually been a coma.

No, he rejected that, too. If that were the case, Penny would have reacted to his confusion with pity, not hurt and anger.

That was as far as he could investigate on his own. He knocked at the door of the room that contained his most reliable counselor.

“Go away!” Her voice was hoarse with anguish.

“Please, honey. I'm sorry for anything I said. I don't know what's happening to me.” His throat caught. “Penny, I'm scared.”

There was a silence. Then bedsprings shifted, and after another pause the lock snapped. She opened the door just wide enough to show swollen red eyes and the stains of tears on her cheeks. Penny had good genes and took better care of herself than Herb did. The only time she looked her age was when she'd been crying.

He saw her expression change from pain to concern. His face felt cold, the blood drained from it, and he knew he was pale. She opened the door the rest of the way. He followed her and sat down on the edge of the bed while she turned away to dry her eyes and blow her nose delicately. She put the handkerchief on the night table and turned to face him. “What's going on, Herb?”

“I wish to God I knew.” Staring at the floor, he told her about some of the things that were different: the carpet, the remote, the missing satellite box. He didn't mention JFK—that was too
complicated—or the pictures that had vanished, or who was in them. He sensed that would have upset her all over again.

When he finished, she sat beside him and took both his hands in hers. She spoke in a calm, measured tone, maintaining eye contact, the way he'd heard and seen her do while reasoning with their daughter when she was small, and more recently with their grandchildren when they misbehaved—or had she? He forced his mind to stay in one place and concentrate on what she was saying.

“We're saving up for a new carpet,” she said. “Right now, it's not in our budget. You know we can't afford satellite TV on your salary.”

“We don't have to depend on my salary. You're head of Pediatrics at Burgess General. You make more money than I do.”

“Herb, I'm a housewife. I gave up nursing when we got married. Burgess doesn't have a female doctor on staff. Few hospitals do.”

He took away his hands and held his head. Suddenly it was pounding. Maybe he was having a seizure after all.

Her voice remained steady. “Tell me everything you can remember, the way you think things are.”

He lowered his hands and drew a deep breath. Complicated or not, he had to go into it. Somehow it seemed to be at the core of all that was wrong. “Kennedy—”

“Not Kennedy. Us. You tried to call a daughter we don't have. I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when we were engaged. I had to have a hysterectomy. When I came out of the anesthetic, I offered to release you from your proposal, because we'd talked so much about having children. You said it didn't matter, that nothing mattered as long as you got to live the rest of your life with me. We never mentioned children again, until today. Does any of this sound familiar?”

“You had a hysterectomy, but only after we'd been married two years. The way I remember the conversation, I told you one child
was plenty, that we'd give her all the love we'd have divvied up among the lot. We spoiled her. She gave us some bad times, but she turned out all right in the end. She married a good man and they have two children, a boy named Brian and a girl named Amber. Our
grand
children.”

She shocked him with a bittersweet smile. “Goodness. All that, and I'm a doctor, too? When did I have time to go to medical school?”

“I was a junior executive with an advertising agency; I quit to stay home with Becca. We had to scrimp, but with a loan from the GI Bill we got along until you'd graduated and served your internship. When you joined the staff at Burgess, we could afford regular day care, and I went back to work. I'm a senior executive, you're a chief of staff. Penny, we're very well off.”

“How could you qualify under the GI Bill? You never served with the military.”

He held his head again. It felt as if the back of his skull would fly off. “But I did! If I hadn't, you and I would never have met. A land mine nearly took off my leg in Vietnam. You were the nurse assigned to me in the VA hospital when I came home. I proposed to you when I was in therapy.”

“Vietnam? I haven't heard of that place in ages. We never were at war there. You work for Meredith and Klugman Advertising, but as a copywriter. You were passed over for promotion so many times, you stopped applying. You're not one of those cutthroat, get-ahead-by-any-means corporate sharks. That's one of the many reasons I love you.”

Less than half of that sank in. “How could there have been no Vietnam War? It's the defining event of our generation!”

“Herb.” She settled back into that reassuring one-note tone. “We met on a blind date. Your friend Brian Hurley fixed us up. He was dating my cousin. You and I hit it off right away. Wartime romances are for novelists.”

This news was even more of a blow. He couldn't tell her that Brian Hurley, his best friend since kindergarten, had died in a rice field during the siege of Khe Sanh. They would have named their child after him if they'd had a boy. Instead, his daughter had honored his request to christen her firstborn Brian. “Brian's alive?” was all he could manage.

She pressed her lips tight, then opened them wide enough to say, “He's your supervisor at Meredith and Klugman. If I were mean enough to wish death on anyone, it would be that snake.”

 

Penny made an appointment with Dr. Martin Sprague, who by luck happened to be in his office on Sunday and had a cancellation. “You're overworked, is all,” she said, sounding unconvinced herself. “That Ipana account has been eating your lunch for weeks.” She offered to drive him, but he insisted on driving there alone; to clear his head, he said. Actually that monotonous catechism had begun to wear away at the last nerve he had left. He refrained from pointing out that Ipana toothpaste had gone out with
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. If she'd said, “Who's Dick Van Dyke?” he'd have dived straight off the deep end.

Assuming he hadn't already.

His car, at least, was the late-model Chrysler he knew well; he'd never cared to flaunt his affluence with a Cadillac or some sporty foreign job. The seat belt and airbag had vanished, but today that kind of discovery seemed to be the norm. He didn't even register surprise when the billboard that had advertised a credit union on Friday was now flogging Marlboro cigarettes, complete with a stubbled cowboy puffing away with no Surgeon General's Warning in sight. After the first hour or so, insanity seemed to have come with its own rules of consistency. He was sure now he was crazy, and even if political correctness did or did not exist in this strange new landscape, he felt he was entitled to use the term “crazy,” just as an African-American could be excused the N-word.

He switched on the radio. It seemed he couldn't punish himself enough on this day of all days.

“. . . And they are mild! Returning to the news, President McCain is on his way to Cuba to meet with President John Gotti, Junior, regarding—”

He punched another button.

“Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, used the occasion of his eightieth birthday celebration to call for renewed efforts to reverse the Supreme Court's decision upholding the constitutionality of the so-called ‘Jim Crow' laws in the South. Negroes throughout—”

He punched another button.

“—which will mark the Detroit Lions' third straight trip to the Super Bowl. In late-breaking news, John F. Kennedy, Junior, was seen arriving at the funeral of his father, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, in the company of pop star Madonna, who wore a provocative—”

The juniors had inherited the earth. He punched another button.

“—despite rumors of a reconciliation, and possibly a new musical collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney—”

He switched off the radio.

“Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!” he confided to the headliner; and was embarrassed to observe the driver of a Studebaker with the dealer's sticker still adhering to the passenger's-side window staring at him at a stoplight.

Herb Tarnower found a space next to the entrance of Dr. Sprague's office (there were no handicapped spots in the lot) and amused himself with the latest issue of
Collier's
until a nurse called his name. She, at least, wore one of those floral-print smocks that had taken the place of starched whites. That ruled out time travel.

Dr. Sprague's appearance shocked him. He'd always been overweight, but now he was positively obese, entering the examination
room with a pronounced waddle, and Herb had never seen him smoking a cigar at the office before. He mentioned the cigar.

The doctor took it out of his mouth and looked at it. “Yes, if the antitobacco lobby gets its way, I won't even be able to enjoy one in a building I pay rent on.”

Herb tried to remember when the state had passed a law against smoking in the workplace. Everything seemed to have been set back either a few years, or dozens.

“Marty, I think I'm losing my mind. Penny thinks I've just been working too hard, but suddenly nothing makes sense anymore.”

“Penny? Oh, yes, Mrs. Tarnower.” Sprague was looking at a sheet on a clipboard. “How is the little woman?”

“See, that's just the thing. You know her as
Doctor
Tarnower. You've been colleagues at Burgess General Hospital for fifteen years. You and I play golf.”

“I gave up golf years ago, too fat to swing a club. Are you a drinking man, Mr. Tarnower? What you're describing sounds like symptoms of prolonged alcoholic poisoning. It warps and destroys brain cells.”

“If you'd asked me that this morning, I'd have told you I drink moderately when I drink at all. Now, for all I know, I'm a hopeless wino. Everything's upside down.”