The Time Traveler's Almanac (157 page)

Officially, though, and perhaps in law, I do not exist. Neither the county nor the state has any record of my birth (nor my father’s; my grandmother’s birth, however, is duly recorded). Lawrenceville and Princeton have no record of my attendance and graduation. Even the United States Army, that indefatigable maker and keeper of records has no paper that acknowledges my three years of servitude. And it is a melancholy fact that no one in the world seems to know or remember me; not friends from prep school days, not college classmates or fellow officers, not a soul in the old home town. My precise and detailed recollection of my twenty-five years of life is always and everywhere belied by records both public and private, and by every reality of the world around me.

Yet I am real, I am a living, breathing, thinking human being, as solid and sentient as any of the degenerates who surround me here. As I skulk about this decrepit travesty of my native town, I reflect endlessly upon my impossible existence, upon the resemblances and differences between this world and my own, upon an explanation for the situation in which I find myself. And I have found the explanation, and in finding it I find some hope. I can only wait, and watch Loob.

It is true that certain parts of my explanation are, perhaps, in a way, to a certain degree (if you like) conjectural; nonetheless, it hangs together, it hangs together. Up to a certain August day in 1905 this world and my own were identical; my explanation rests, therefore, on simple, unarguable fact. On that day there was a divergence, a forking, and Loob was the cause. It took me some time to figure that out.

To identify Loob as the villain, that is. I was much quicker at the rest of it, at accounting for the existence of this town. It is located where the town of my birth is located, it bears the same name, it has the same history up to a point. It is composed of the same streets and buildings that make up the older part of my own town, horribly run-down here, all in a state of slovenly desuetude, with buildings vacant and boarded up, trash in the deserted streets, insolent weeds growing in and around the ruins of structures that have burned or fallen down. It is a depressed and depressing place, forming a most bleak and demoralizing contrast with the self-confident bustle and gloss of the town I knew.

My own situation is also considerably different. There I am the heir apparent, the young master, indulged in expensive toys – a Ferrari, a string of polo ponies – by a doting grandmother. Here I work as a swamper in a saloon; the Top Hat Bar and Grill, to be exact. It is the only work available to a nameless unperson. (They call me Tom Perkins. I don’t know where they got that. Back when I still talked, I used to ask them to use my real name, but the request always generated so much laughter that I gave it up.) At that, I am one of the very few people here who work; most of the town is on welfare, as I might be myself if I could establish the fact that I exist. Ironically, they have volunteered to put me on the welfare rolls under the name of Tom Perkins, an offer which I declined. That also caused a good deal of laughter.

Day after day, as I cleaned the spittoons (three-pound coffee cans, actually) and mopped the foul floor, my mind was occupied by a sustained effort to discover, through the application of the most rigorous logic, a theory to account for my presence in a world where my presence is impossible. (This was after my parole from the state hospital, after I had achieved a measure of resignation to my plight.) The initial stages of my analysis were simple enough: I postulated that any occurrence, anywhere, anytime, is a cause that has a consequent effect. A major occurrence has a major effect and changes history. Now, from the beginning, history has been an infinity of forks in a road, with the road not taken disappearing forever after it is passed, so that a backward look shows only a single thoroughfare stretching to the rear. But suppose that somehow, from our present position on this thoroughfare, a barricade could be hurled backward, back to one of those forks in the road, compelling events to travel on the alternative route. As time went by, and fork after fork came and went, a retrospective survey of the route taken would not show that the main road was missed long ago. It would not show that we now travel on a detour, a sad, sick, degenerate, abominable detour. But the main road is still there, is still there. I think logic dictates that we must believe it is still there.

The exercise of pure reason had brought me to that point, but there my search for the truth began to appear to be almost hopeless. Reduced to essentials, it had become a search for the villain. Someone had erected the barricade that shunted history into the detour and exiled me from the main road to this wretched byway, and whoever he was, he had to be found and compelled to undo his villainy. But the world is a big place, containing a very considerable number of people, and I had not the least vague clue to his identity. A mad scientist? A military secret project? A lama spinning a prayer wheel in Tibet?

My problem was further complicated by the fact that I am not permitted to leave town. The people at the state hospital have decreed that I must be brought in once a month to be questioned and tested, presumably for reassurance that I can safely continue to be farmed out to the Top Hat Bar and Grill. I gather that before my incarceration I sometimes did violent things. (When I compare my mashed-in face with the way I used to look, I can believe it.) Okie Perkins, Prop. of the Top Hat Bar and Grill, drives me to these monthly vettings, where I steadfastly maintain silence despite the often ingenious subterfuges the headshrinkers use to get me to talk. I have promised myself that I shall speak no word until I am back where I belong. Obviously this vow was a further impediment to my investigation.

But I had some good luck, which served me as well as cold reason and sedulous research could have done. I found Loob. At some point in my despairing prowlings through the town, I became aware of him, and I came gradually to realize that I had found the culprit. It was no blazing revelation, or anything of that sort; but as soon as I began to suspect him I undertook to weigh his qualifications as a suspect against the indisputable facts, and, little by little, it became perfectly plain that it was indeed Loob who had done this unspeakable thing. I matched the history of the town – one history until 1905, and then two, both of which I had pondered obsessively – with what I knew about Loob, and at last the whole grim story was laid out for me.

I said that finding him was good luck, but it was bad luck as well, because my plan to compel an undoing of the evil has come to nothing; quite clearly there is no way to compel Loob to do anything at all. There is not even any way to talk to him – which I would be eager to do if he could understand. But he cannot talk, and so certain portions of the story must remain forever conjecture. But they fit the facts, the whole thing coheres.

So now I watch him and wait for the day when he will undo what he did. Because there is nothing to do but watch and wait. And (I cannot help it) hope. I stalk him through the town, willing him to go to the house, to sit in the window. That is where he must be to change things back. When he is in the house, I usually lurk somewhere outside, not because I can affect what may happen, but simply out of an unexplainable feeling that I should be there. And then, too, looking at the house can sometimes evoke my real life so strongly that for a moment I forget where I am.

The house, my grandmother’s house in the real world. A mansion with many chimneys, enduringly built of the pale-gray local sandstone, still displaying a basic elegance of line and proportion. Its walls remain as stout as the day they were built, and the slates of the roof still turn the rain; but there is no glass in any window, nor a door in any doorway, and the winds sweep through, blowing dust and trash in squalid patterns across the floor. There are no rooms on the first story; the interior walls were torn out years ago and replaced by a number of steel poles to bear the weight of the upper floors. In the cavernous space thus created, a foredoomed machine shop had existed precariously for a few years before it sank into bankruptcy and abandoned its worn-out lathes and drills to the scavengers and vandals. This is where Loob likes to be.

He likes to sit on a box in one of the oriel windows. From there he looks down to the river, across the junk piles and weeds that were once a smooth lawn sloping to the edge of the woods, across the rusty railroad tracks and decaying sheds that stand where great trees grew in the days when the house was in history’s mainstream. He sits there for a large part of almost every day, watching an inconstant landscape: seeing sometimes a squirm of rats among frozen weeds, sometimes a small giggling girl frolicking with a patient dog on a summer lawn, sometimes other things. Loob feels no curiosity about these alterations of the view. Most things in life are incomprehensible to him, and all phenomena are equally unexpected and equally unsurprising. But the little girl engages somewhat more of his attention than do the rats; the pretty lady at the piano is marginally more interesting than a ruined milling machine. Loob is happier (if that is the word for the viscid stirring within him) when he is watching the past.

During all the eighteen years of his life the past has been his milieu as often as the present. He does not distinguish between them. Some things can be touched and some cannot; that is one of the things he knows, and it is his sole perception of the difference between past and present. His questing hand will pass through the piano but be arrested by the milling machine; neither occurrence surprises him. If the piano were suddenly to become palpable and the milling machine insubstantial, he would not remember that it had ever been otherwise.

He answers to “Loob,” short for “Loober,” which is as close as he can come to pronouncing Luther. His name is another of the things he knows. Boys used to use that fact to bait him.

“Hey, Loob. What’s your name, Loob?”

“Loo – ber.” Thick, slow, forced out after a struggle.

Laughter. “Make him do it again.”

“What’s your name, Loob?”

“Loo – ber.”

And laughter again. But now he has grown to several inches over six feet and weighs three hundred pounds. They no longer tease him. He has never been known to harm anyone, but his size and appearance have emancipated him from the role of butt. When he walks in the streets now, they say, “Hi, Loob,” or even, “Hello, Luther.” All of the people here know each other. A stranger may say, “My God, what’s that?” and someone will tell him, “Oh, that’s Luther Rankin. One of our village idiots. Perfectly harmless.”

The speaker will be mistaken; Loob is anything but perfectly harmless. He can do – has done – abominable things, as no one knows better than I. But he has not done them with malice; he has not intended harm. He has never in his life intended anything at all and indeed is incapable of having intentions. The abominations happened simply because Loob is what he is; they came about as suddenly, and with as little premeditation, as the collapse of a river bank in a flood. But it is because of Loob that the house is what it is. That the town is what it is.

For three quarters of a century the town has been dying. At the turn of the century it passed almost overnight from its lusty prime into senescence, but ever since it has clung with a kind of weak tenacity to a spark of life, and now, shrunken and listless, it squats and decays on its mountainside, still housing in decrepit grimy dwellings a few hundred dispirited clients of the welfare system. Trains still make runs along the track that winds down the valley beside the river, but it has been many years since the train has stopped here, and the town’s name on the depot has almost weathered away. A new interstate highway carries most of the traffic that formerly used the river road, and the town’s last filling station stands boarded up at the corner where Main Street meets the road. There are only two stores left, and one saloon. The school has been abandoned, and all but one of the churches. It is a town without hope and without pride, a place with no reason for existing except to provide shelter of a sort for people who are themselves without hope or pride.

Once long ago it was a prosperous confident town, whose citizens believed it might one day rival Pittsburgh. It was not a wholly impossible vision. The Dappling Iron Works, which had grown prodigiously during the Civil War, leagued itself with the railroads when the war ended, and if Henry Dappling had been another kind of man, he might have pushed himself into the company of Carnegie and Frick and made his town a city like theirs. But he was not driven by ambition, and his factory and his town in the first years of the new century were exactly as he wanted them to be: healthy, bustling, productive – and of manageable size. He was comfortable in his role as First Citizen and Squire, and he approved of a community that was not too large for every citizen to know him and know his position. He liked the town as it was, and he liked his own position within it.

He took a keen pleasure in his daily trip to the plant, the ceremony and style of it. Every morning at eight, his polished buggy passed between the gateposts of the estate and proceeded briskly into town along Dappling Road, Dappling portly and erect in the seat, snugly buttoned into well-tailored sober broadcloth, in firm control of a team of matched chestnuts. There were no doffed hats or tugged forelocks as he passed, but those who shouted good morning to him called him Mr. Dappling.

Dappling Road curved around a hill and sloped downward to meet Main Street; Dappling’s house was in fact quite near the town, but hidden from it by the cheek of the hill. At Main Street he turned left, down into the town, past houses that became progressively larger as he approached the square. The block nearest the square had mansions on both sides of the street, large dark buildings of brick or stone, heavily ginger-breaded, standing at the backs of deep lawns. These were the homes of Dappling’s superintendents and the banker and the most prosperous of the merchants. The retail commerce of the town took place around the square, and most of the merchants contrived to be at their doors to greet Dappling as the buggy passed smartly by. He returned to each a sober inclination of the head, a nod calculated precisely to indicate relative social positions. On the lower side of the square was another block of fine houses, and then the row houses of the mill workers down to the wrought-iron gates of the Dappling Iron Works.