Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  “Ma’am,” I said quietly. “I’m not making fun. Don’t go yet. Wait a moment.”

  She hesitated with her hand on the latch. She was very pale.

  “Your son is going to make it home and write a whole pile of novels. That’s the first of them. If you try and look at it now, your eyes will go funny, because Die Laughing! hasn’t been published yet. I’m not sure when it came out—1970, maybe? Go ahead. Look at it.”

  She lowered her chin and stared at the book on the floor, a slick trade paperback with Tom Hanks’s stern, grieving face on the cover and Zachary Quinto in the background, on his knees, laughing convulsively with blood all over his hands.

  “Oooh,” she said, and put a hand to her left temple and swayed and shut her eyes. “It makes me motion sick.” When she looked at me again, her lips were colorless and she was beginning to tremble. “What are you doing to me? Did you . . . I don’t know, give me dope? I’ve heard you can put LSD right against someone’s skin and make them ill.”

  “No, ma’am.” I picked up the book and handed it to her. When she looked at it again, it was the Freas cover once more. She exhaled slowly. “When you’re not holding it, it slides out of your time and back toward mine. That’s why it makes you motion sick to look at it. But as long as you’re holding it, it’ll stay frozen in your time, and then it’s safe to read.” I flashed to a sudden memory of reading the book myself in eighth grade and said, “I think he dedicated it to you. I’m not sure. Look.”

  She folded back the cover, and there it was:

  To Lynn Dolan, without whom this book wouldn’t have been possible

  But I had forgotten what was below the dedication:

  (1926–1966)

  Now it was my turn to feel motion sick. “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry. I forgot—I haven’t read it since I was in junior high school—”

  When she lifted her chin, though, she no longer looked afraid but instead stricken with wonder. She was heartbreakingly beautiful, with her fine delicate features and great dark eyes. I could’ve just about fallen in love with her, if she weren’t more than fifty years dead.

  “It’s real,” she whispered. “It’s not a bad joke. My son writes this in a few years, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Dolan . . . I’m so sorry . . . I shouldn’t have . . .”

  “But you should have, and you did, and this is how I know you aren’t being cruel. I’m quite aware this is the last year of my life,” she said, and her lips moved in the slightest smile. “I’ve known for a few weeks. That’s what I can’t stand. Not hearing from him, and knowing I might never find out if he makes it back. How do you—” She pursed her lips.

  “When I left this morning,” I said, “to do my rounds in the Bookmobile, it was December 2019. But sometimes this happens. People from the past show up to borrow books. I met a guy named Fred Mueller—”

  “Fred Mueller!” she cried. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. From West Fever. Poor man.”

  “Yes. He turned up in my Bookmobile a few weeks ago, and I gave him a book that won’t be out for a while. I hope he liked it. I’m pretty sure it was his kind of thing.”

  “A few weeks ago?” she said. “He died ten months back. I was going to write Brad and tell him, then thought better. I only send him good news from home. Every day over there could be his last, I don’t want him to have a head full of rotten . . .” But then she fell silent and looked down at the paperback in her hands again. She peeked inside and flinched. “I can’t read the copyright. The numbers jump out of sight when I try to focus on them.” She leafed through some of the other pages. “But I can read the rest.” Then she gave me a bright, curious look. “Can I read the rest? You’re going to let me borrow it?”

  “As long as you’ve got a library card,” I said, and she laughed. “I think you have one to return? One that’s past due? That’s part of how this seems to work.”

  “Oh! Yes,” she said. She opened a black velvet flap on her purse and plucked out a copy of Valley of the Dolls. Her cheeks pinked up just slightly. “What trash,” she said, and burbled softly with embarrassed amusement.

  “So pretty great, huh?” I asked, and her giggle turned to a shout of laughter.

  I led her back to the desk. She followed on unsteady legs, glancing here and there.

  “I see it now,” she said. “The books. Some of them are all right. But most of them are . . . shivering. Like they’re cold. And it’s hard to read the names on the bindings.” She laughed again, but it was a nervous, unhappy titter. “This isn’t happening, is it? I’m on the couch. I’ve been taking pills for my . . . well, I’ve had some discomfort. I must’ve passed out, and now I’m imagining this.”

  “Can you talk to a doctor?” I asked. “About your condition?”

  When she replied, it was a one-word whisper: “No.”

  “It might not be too late, and it would mean everything to Brad Dolan if he could come home to his mother.”

  The muscles at the corners of her jaw tightened, and it came to me that this small, frail, pretty woman was harder—tougher—than she’d seemed at first. “It would mean everything to me to be there when he does. But I don’t get to have that. I worked eight years on the cancer ward in Kingsward Hospital. I know the best-case scenario. I’m living it. Has treatment improved any in your time?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Well, then. I’m sorry I can’t hold on for fifty years. How’s my son doing in the next century?”

  I felt a drafty, hollow feeling in my chest, but I think I was able to keep my face all but expressionless when I replied, “He’s never been more popular. They teach him. There have been movies based on the books.”

  “Do I have grandchildren?”

  I said, “Truthfully, I don’t know. I love his novels, but it’s not like I’ve ever Googled him.”

  “Goo-gilled?”

  “Oh. Uh. Looked him up. Google is like a twenty-first-century encyclopedia.”

  “And he’s in it? He’s in the Google?”

  “You bet.”

  She looked very pleased at that. “My kid! Right there in the Google.” She considered me for a moment. “How is this happening? If it’s happening. I still expect to wake up on the couch any minute now. I doze off all the time these days. I get tired so easily.”

  “It’s happening, but I couldn’t tell you how it’s possible.”

  “And you’re not an envoy from the Lord? You’re not an angel?”

  “Nope. Just a librarian.”

  “Ah, well,” she said. “That’s close enough for me.”

  And before I stamped her card, she leaned across my desk and kissed my cheek.

  IT WAS DARK AND SNOWING briskly the night I knocked on a door marked 309 at Serenity Apartments. Voices murmured. Chair legs scraped across the floor. The door opened, and Ralph Tanner peered out at me. He had on a blue cardigan and a blue collared shirt and steel-colored denims—I assumed this was his idea of dressing down.

  “What’s the password?” he asked.

  I lifted the bottle in my right hand. There was a silver bow on the neck. “I brought bourbon?”

  “Right the first time,” he said, and let me in.

  He led me into a large room that served as kitchen, living area, and bedroom all at once. It was, I imagined, not so different from one of the efficiency apartments in West Fever, although of a better class. The TV was tuned to MSNBC, the volume turned down. Rachel Maddow, looking good in a close-cut jacket, spoke sincerely into the camera. In front of it, two old men sat at a table that looked as if it had been nailed together out of driftwood. One of them I recognized. His name was Terry Gallagher, and that evening he wore a floppy-brimmed fishing hat with a LOCK HER UP pin on it. I saw Gallagher every Thursday morning when I brought the Bookmobile around to Serenity Apartments. He would scuffle slowly through the library car, grousing at books by bleeding-heart lefties like Michael Moore, Elizabeth Warren, and Dr. Seuss, then check out something
by Laura Ingraham. The other guy at the table I had never met. Loren Hayes was riding a bulky, electrically powered wheelchair and had an oxygen tube in his nose. He shot me a wary look with bloodshot eyes.

  He had a big, craggy face with somewhat comical, oversize features. He was heavily overweight, but even still his head was too big for his body, an effect amplified by the great oily black sweep of his hair, which he combed Ronald Reagan style. His white T-shirt, which showed Ian McKellen standing in front of a gay-pride flag, clung to the bulge of his stomach and his sagging bosom. (Across the top it read GANDALF IS GAY, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, YOU’RE PROBABLY AN ORC.)

  “What are we playing?” I asked as I sat down. Ralph took the bourbon off my hands, unscrewed the top, and poured an inch into a quartet of chipped mugs and plastic cups.

  “An old, well-loved game,” Gallagher called. “Put on MSNBC and see how long Terry Gallagher can sit there before he loses his goddamned mind. It’s like putting a lobster into a pot of cold water and turning on the heat. They want to see how long I can take it before I start leaping to escape.”

  “Someone open the window,” Loren Hayes said. “We’re on the third floor. Maybe he’ll leap that way.”

  Ralph sat down with us. “How about Hearts? There’s four of us, we’ve got just the right number. Come on now, Mr. Gallagher. We turned the sound off for you. The bad woman can’t hurt you. We’ll keep you safe from all her reason and science and compassion.”

  “Just keep your back turned,” Loren Hayes added. “If you look at her, there’s the very real possibility you might catch a glimpse of empathy and it’ll give you a sour tummy.”

  Gallagher shot me a pleading gaze. “They’ve got me outvoted two to one. Any chance you’ll throw your support behind Fox? We’re missing Tucker.”

  “I met a woman last week who got all her news from Walter Cronkite,” I said. “Boy, they sure don’t make ’em like him anymore, do they?”

  The table was silent while Ralph dealt. Gallagher looked from me to Loren Hayes and back. Loren fanned his cards out and gave them a long, silent study.

  I said, “Mr. Hayes, you know we’ve got a wheelchair-ramp attachment for the Bookmobile.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where’d that come from? That’s new,” Hayes said. “We never had that when I was driving.”

  “We lifted it off the newer Bookmobile,” Ralph said. “The one that was damaged.”

  “If you’re ever in the mood for something to read—” I began.

  “If I’m in the mood for something to read, I’ll order it online,” Hayes said. “I don’t think I’d want to borrow from the Bookmobile. You might try to offer me a novel that won’t come out for another ten years, and I’d be faced with the very strong possibility this old basstid is going to outlive me.” Nodding at Gallagher.

  We played a couple of tricks without speaking.

  “Did you ever change anything?” I asked. “Did you ever try to change anything?”

  “Like what?” Hayes asked.

  “Give someone a book about John Lennon’s life and death to see if they could stop the assassination?”

  “If I gave someone a book about John Lennon’s assassination,” Hayes said, “and they stopped it, then how would I give them a book about John Lennon’s assassination?”

  “Different . . . timelines? Parallel universes?”

  “In a parallel universe, you didn’t take the queen of spades. But in this reality you just ate thirteen points,” Hayes said, and dropped the queen on me. “Whoever you want to save, Mr. Davies, they can’t be saved. I’ve tried.”

  “Then what’s the point?” I asked. “What’s the point of being able to reach back in time if you can’t do any good?”

  “Who said you can’t do any good? Did I say that? I just said you can’t save them.”

  “Save who?” I asked. I felt a little winded. I’d had a single swallow of bourbon, and it was in my stomach like a thimbleful of battery acid.

  “Whoever they are,” he said, and met my gaze. One of his eyes was filmed lightly with cataract. “I tried. I thought I could smuggle a letter back to the past and save my best friend in the world, Alex Sommers. This was 1991, and Alex was in hospice. Alex caught himself a fatal case of what was going around among my people then, and he slunk off to die, shunned and forgotten, despised by his ultra-Christian family for being a faggot and feared by his friends who worried they might catch it off him if he started to cough. I thought I could stop it from ever happening.” His voice roughened, and he dropped his cards.

  “That’s enough of this,” Gallagher said. He took Hayes’s hand and glared at me. “Who the fuck are you? Come in here and ruin our game of cards.”

  Ralph Tanner spoke very softly. “Mr. Davies has also lost people. And only wants to do the right thing. But he’s dealing with something only Loren really understands.” It was the first I was sure Ralph knew about my parents. He had known right from the start, I suppose. Like I said, Kingsward is a big town, but not big enough for secrets.

  Hayes said, “I wrote a letter. I had it all ready to go. I had stamps from different time periods, because you don’t know where they’ll come from. I had some from the early sixties, some from the mid-eighties, and everything in between. One day a woman climbs on, buxom redhead. Glasses. Very strict, stern, right-wing dominatrix type. Gallagher, you woulda had a stroke. You would’ve been almost as hot for her as you were for them to impeach Clinton. We got to talking, and she wondered aloud if the terrorists were going to kill the Jewish athletes in Munich, and that was how I knew she was one of them, a Late Return. She liked legal thrillers, so I got her a Scott Turow that wouldn’t be published for another twenty years. Then I asked if she’d post a letter. She looked at the envelope and laughed and rubbed her eyes. I slipped the letter in the back of her book. Well. I went back to my time. She went back to hers. In her time, 1972, she was a paralegal having an office romance, and her ex-husband shotgunned her and her lover both. In my time Alex Sommers weighed about ninety pounds and was black all over with Kaposi’s sarcoma. I couldn’t figure what went wrong. I tried to talk to him about it. I asked him if he got a letter when he was ten years old from someone he didn’t know, and he went paler than his sheets. He said he read the part about being gay and tore it up. He said he vomited for days afterward. Not just because of what it said but because trying to read it had made him sick. He said the words kept swimming away when he tried to look at them. Later he decided he was mental and had hallucinated the whole thing. He thought his subconscious was trying to find some way to make him accept that he was gay and came up with an imaginary letter. He remembered some stuff about sickness but assumed that was just his guilt talking. He had a lot of guilt back then. Anyway. I couldn’t change it.” Hayes’s bloodshot eyes were damp.

  I knew that Ralph and Gallagher had heard some of this before. I could tell from how Ralph stared mildly down at his cards, refusing to make eye contact. I could tell from the way Gallagher glared at me with a kind of naked hatred. I liked him better for his hate. It was born from the love of a comrade.

  “There you go,” Gallagher said. “Get what you wanted?”

  “I’m sorry you couldn’t do him any good,” I said.

  Ralph said, “But he did.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Hayes said.

  “He did,” Ralph repeated. “You said Alex had a lot of guilt as a kid. Enough to kill himself? Maybe. Plenty of young gay men do and did, especially then. But the letter was the living proof that he had a future where someone cared about him. He got that much, even if you couldn’t prevent him from contracting a tragic illness, and it was a reason to carry on with his life.” He fell back to the study of his cards. “Then there was the Harry Potter situation. I think that’s particularly illustrative of the good you’ve done, Loren.”

  “Good I’ve done,” Hayes said scornfully.

  “What was the Harry Potter situation?” I asked, although I already had an idea.
>
  Loren Hayes took a long, measuring look at Terry Gallagher, then lowered his head and told it. “The last year I drove the Bookmobile was 2009. At that time I had a Monday stop at the hospital. Sometimes a few of the kids from the cancer ward would march out, if they were having a good day, for a poke around. There was a girl who stalked in one day in wizard robes, absolutely furious, shouting that goldarn it, J. K. Rowling had ended the frickin’ book on a frickin’ cliff-hanger, and she was going to die before she knew how it all came out. And she threw a copy of the second-to-last Harry Potter at me. Well, the final Potter book hadn’t come out in her time, but it had in mine. She wanted magic. I gave her some.”

  “That kid finished the series before J. K. Rowling did,” Ralph said with a raised eyebrow. “After she passed away, someone in her family thoughtfully returned her library books. I recognized Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows right off as something that didn’t exist yet, and I set it aside, put it out of circulation. After reading it myself, of course. While I am not utterly without self-control, I’m also not a masochist, and I very much wanted to know about Snape.”

  “What’s your angle?” I asked Terry Gallagher. “You’ve heard all this crap before, I take it. And you believe it?”

  Gallagher gave me a dismal, harried, out-of-sorts look. “Who do you think returned The Deathly Hallows to the library? My daughter was too distraught to do anything after Chloë died, so I did it for her. My grandkid loved those books.” He paused, tugged at one corner of his bushy white mustache. “I read it to her, the last one. When she was too weak to pick up the book. I wanted to know how it came out, too.”

  “I’ve thought about this for decades,” Hayes said. “Tried to make sense of it. I know this much: The people who show up in the Bookmobile from other eras are there because they’re yearning for something. Yearning is the only thing that can reach across time that way. You can’t give them something they don’t need. Terry’s granddaughter needed to know if Snape was a bad guy or not. She didn’t need to know about all the shit that was going to happen after she passed. Assassinations and natural disasters and terrorism. She had a story to finish before her own story was finished. That’s what she was there for. That’s what I could do for her.”