The Third Level

by Jack Finney

  And when I turned to look at him, eyes cold, he had the nerve to smile at me, as though I were supposed to nod and grin and agree that any car not made day before yesterday was an automatic side-splitting riot. I just looked away, and when the light changed he thought he'd show me just how sick his big $4,000 job could make my pitiful old antique look. The light clicked, and his foot was on the gas, his automatic transmission taking hold, and he'd already started to grin. But I started when he did, feeding the gas in firm and gentle, and we held even till I shot it into second, faster than any automatic transmission yet invented can, and drew right past him; and when I looked back, it was me who was grinning. But still, at the next light, every pedestrian crossing in front of my car treated me to a tolerant, understanding smile; and when the light changed, I swung off Main.

  That was one thing that happened; the second was that my date wouldn't go out with me. I guess I shouldn't blame her. First she saw how I was dressed, which didn't help me with her. Then I showed her the Jordan at the curb, and she nodded, not even slightly interested, and said it was very nice, which didn't help her with me. And then — well, she's a good-looking girl, Naomi Weygand, and while she didn't exactly put it in those words, she let me know she meant to be seen, preferably on a dance floor, and not waste her youth and beauty riding around in some old antique. And when I told her I was going out in the Jordan and if she wanted to come along, fine, and if she didn't — well, she didn't. Eight seconds later she was opening her front door again, while I scorched rubber pulling away from the curb.

  I felt the way you would have by then, and I wanted to get out of town and alone somewhere, and I shoved it into second, gunning the car, heading for the old Cressville road. It used to be the only road to Cressville, a two-lane paved highway just barely wide enough for cars to pass. But there's been a new highway for 15 years — four lanes, and straight as a ruler except for two long curves you can do 90 on, and you can make the 7 miles to Cressville in 5 minutes or less.

  But it's a dozen winding miles on the old road, and half a mile of it, near Cressville, was flooded out once, and the concrete is broken and full of gaps; you have to drive it in low. So nobody uses the old road nowadays except four or five farm families who live along it.

  When I swung onto the old road — there are a lot of big old trees all along it — I began to feel better. I just ambled along, no faster than 30, maybe, clear up to the broken stretch before I turned back toward Hylesburg, and it was wonderful. I'm not a sports-car man myself, but they've got something when they talk about getting close to the road and into the outdoors again, the way driving used to be before people shut themselves behind great sheets of glass and metal and began rushing along superhighways, their eyes on the white line. I had the windshield folded down flat against the hood, and the summer air streamed over my face and through my hair, and I could see the road just beside and under me flowing past so close I could have touched it. The air was alive with the heavy fragrances of summer darkness and the rich nostalgic sounds of summer insects, and I wasn't even thinking, but just living and enjoying it.

  One of the old Playboy advertisements, famous in their day, calls the Jordan this brawny graceful thing, and says, It revels along with the wandering wind and roars like a Caproni biplane. It's a car for a man's man — that's certain. Or for a girl who loves the out-of-doors. Rich prose for these days, I guess; we're afraid of rich prose now and laugh in self-defense. But I'll take it over a stern sales talk on safety belts.

  Anyway, I liked just drifting along the old road, a part of the summer outdoors and evening, with the living country around me; and I was no more thinking than a collie dog with his nose thrust out of a car, his eyes half closed against the air stream, enjoying the feeling human beings so often forget of simply being a living creature. “I left my love in Avalon,” I was bawling out at the top of my lungs, hardly knowing when I'd started, and saaailed awaaay! Then I was singing “Alice Blue Gown” very softly and gently. I sang, “Just a Japanese Saaandman!”, and “Whispering,” and Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes, the fields and trees and cattle, and sometimes an occasional car, flowing past in the darkness, and I was having a wonderful time.

  The name “Dempsey” drifted into my head, I don't know why — just a vagrant thought floating lazily up into my consciousness. Now, I saw Jack Dempsey once. Six years ago, when I was fourteen, my dad, my mother, and I took a vacation trip to New York. We saw the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, took a ride on the subway, and all the rest of it. And we had dinner at Jack Dempsey's restaurant on Broadway, and he was there and spoke to us, and my dad talked to him for a minute about his fights. So I saw him — a nice-looking middle-aged man, very big and broad. But the picture that drifted up into my mind now, as I drove along the old Cressville road, wasn't of that Jack Dempsey. It was the face of a young man not a lot older than I was, blackhaired, black-bearded, fierce, and scowling. Dempsey, I thought, that snarling young face rising up clear and vivid in my mind, and the thought completed itself: He beat Tom Gibbons.

  Just a couple of weeks ago Dempsey beat Gibbons — and it was true. I mean it felt true somehow, as though the thought were in the very air around me, like the old songs I'd found myself singing, and suddenly several things I'd been half aware of clicked together in my mind. I'd been dreamily and unthinkingly realizing that there were more cars on the road than I'd have expected, flowing past me in the darkness. Maybe some of the farm families along here were having some sort of Saturday-night get-together, I thought. But then I knew it wasn't true.

  Picture a car's headlights coming toward you; they're two sharp beams slicing ahead into the darkness, an intense blue-white in color, their edges as defined as a ruler's. But these headlights — two more sets of them were approaching me now — were different. They were entirely orange in color, the red-orange of the hot filaments that produced them; and they were hardly even beams, but just twin circles of wide, diffused orange light; and they wavered in intensity, illuminating the road only dimly.

  The nearer lights were almost upon me, and I half rose from my seat, leaning forward over the hood of the Jordan, staring at the car as it passed me. It was a Moon, a cream-colored 1922 Moon roadster.

  The next car, those two orange circles of wavering light swelling, approached, then passed, as I stared and turned to look after it. It looked something like mine — wire wheels, but with the spare on a side mount and with step plates instead of running boards. I knew what it was — a Haynes Speedster — and the man at the wheel wore a cloth cap and the girl beside him wore a large pink hat, coming well down over her head, with a wide brim all around it.

  I sat moving along, a hand on the wheel, in a kind of stunned, ecstatic trance. For now, the Saturday-night traffic at its peak, they all came, one after another, all the glorious old cars — a Saxon Six black-bodied touring car with wood-spoke wheels, and the women in that car wore chin-length veils from the edges of their flowered hats. There passed a gray-bodied black-topped Wills Sainte Claire with orange disk wheels, and the six kids in it were singing, “Who's Sorry Now?” Then I saw another Moon, a light-blue open four-seater, its cutout open, and the kid at the wheel had black hair slicked back in a varnished pompadour, and just glancing at him, you could see he was on his way to a date. Now there came an Elcar, two Model T Fords just behind it; then, a hundred yards back, a red Buick roadster with natural-wood spoke wheels. I saw a Velie, and a car that was either a Noma or a Kissel, I couldn't be sure; and there was a high-topped blue Dodge sedan with cut flowers in little glass vases by the rear doors. There was a car I didn't know at all, then a Stanley Steamer, and just behind it, a wonderful low-slung 1921 Pierce-Arrow, and I knew what had happened and where I was.

  I've read some of the stuff about Time with a capital T, and I don't say I understand it too well. But I know Einstein or somebody compares Time to a winding river and says we exist as though in a boat, drifting along between high banks. All we can see is the
present, immediately around us. We can't see the future just beyond the next curve, or the past in the many bends in back of us. But it's all there just the same. There — countless bends back, in infinite distance — lies the past, as real as the moment around us.

  Well, I'll join Einstein and the others with a notion of my own — just a feeling, actually, hardly even a thought. I wonder if we aren't barred from the past by a thousand invisible chains. You can't drive into the past in a 1956 Buick because there are no 1956 Buicks in 1923, so how could you be there in one? You can't drive into 1923 in a Jordan Playboy, along a four-lane superhighway; there are no superhighways in 1923. You couldn't even, I'm certain, drive with a pack of modern filter-tip cigarettes in your pocket into a night when no such thing existed. Or with so much as a coin bearing a 1956 date, or wearing a charcoal-gray-and-pink shirt on your back. All those things, small and large, are chains keeping you out of a time when they could not exist.

  My car and I — the way I felt about it anyway — were almost rejected that night by the time I lived in. And so there in my Jordan, just as it was the year it was new, with nothing about me from another time, the old '23 tags on my car and moving along a highway whose very oil spots belonged to that year — well, I think that for a few moments, all the chains hanging slack, we were free on the surface of Time. And that, moving along that old highway through the summer evening, we simply drifted into the time my Jordan belonged in.

  That's the best I can do anyway; it's all that occurs to me. And — well, I wish I could offer you proof. I wish I could tell you that when I drove into Hylesburg again, onto Main Street, I saw a newspaper headline saying, President Harding Stricken, or something like that. Or that I heard people discussing Babe Ruth's new home-run record, or saw a bunch of cops raiding a speakeasy.

  But I saw or heard nothing of the sort, nothing much different from the way it always has been. The street was quiet and nearly empty, as it is once the stores shut down for the weekend. I saw only two people at first, just a couple walking along far down the street. As for the buildings, they've been there, most of them, since the Civil War, or before — Hylesburg's an old town — and in the semidarkness left by the street lamps, they looked the same as always, and the street was paved with brick as it has been since World War I.

  No, all I saw driving along Main Street was — just little things. I saw a shoe store, its awning still over the walk, and that awning was striped-broad red-andwhite stripes, and the edges were scalloped. You just don't see awnings like that outside of old photographs, but there it was, and I pulled over to the curb, staring across the walk at the window. But all I can tell you is that there were no open-toed shoes among the women's, and the heels looked a little high to me, and a little different in design somehow. The men's shoes — well, the toes seemed a little more pointed than you usually see now, and there were no suede shoes at all. But the kids' shoes looked the same as always.

  I drove on and passed a little candy-and-stationery shop, and on the door was a sign that said, Drink Coca-Cola, and in some way I can't describe, the letters looked different. Not much, but — you've seen old familiar trade-marks that have gradually changed, kept up-to-date through the years, in a gradual evolution. All I can say is that this old familiar sign looked a little different, a little old-fashioned, but I can't really say how.

  There were a couple of all-night restaurants open as I drove along, one of them the New China, the other Gill's, but they've both been in Hylesburg for years. There were a couple of people in each of them, but I never even thought of going in. It seemed to me I was here by sufferance or accident, that I'd just drifted into this time and had no right actually to intrude on it.

  Next to them was the Orpheum, and though the box office and marquee were dark, there were a few lights still on, and a dozen or so cars parked for half a block on each side of the street. I parked mine on the same side, near a wood telephone pole. Brick pavement is bumpy; when I shut off the motor and reached for the hand brake — I don't know whether this is important or not, but I'd better tell it — the Jordan rolled ahead half a foot as its right front wheel settled into a shallow depression in the pavement. For just a second or so it rocked a little in a tiny series of rapidly decreasing arcs, then stopped, its wheel settled snugly into the depression as though it had found exactly the spot it had been looking for — like a dog turning around several times before it lies down in precisely the right place.

  Walking toward the Orpheum, I saw the big posters in the shallow glass showcases on each side of the entrance. Fri, Sat, and Sun, one said, and it showed a man with a long thin face, wearing a monocle, and his eyes were narrowed, staring at a woman with long hair who looked sort of frightened. George Arliss, said the poster, in The Green Goddess.

  Coming Attraction, said the other poster, Mon, Tues, and Wed, Ashes of Vengeance, starring Norma Talmadge and Conway Tearle, with Wallace Beery. I'd never heard of any of them, except Wallace Beery. In the little open lobby I looked at the still pictures in wall cases at each side of the box office — small, glossy black-and-white scenes from the two movies, and finally recognized Wallace Beery, a thin, handsome, young man.

  But that's about all I can tell you — nothing big or dramatic, and nothing significant, like hearing someone say, Mark my words, that boy Lindbergh will fly the Atlantic yet. All I saw was a little shutdown, eleven-o'clock Main Street.

  The parked cars, though, were a Dort; a high, straight-lined Buick sedan with wood wheels; three Model T's; a blue Hupmobile touring car with blue-and-yellow disk wheels; a four-cylinder Chevrolet roadster; a Winton; a Stutz; a spoke-wheeled Cadillac sedan. Not a single car had been made later than the year 1923. And this is the strange thing; they looked right to me. They looked as though that were the way automobiles were supposed to look, nothing odd, funny, or old-fashioned about them. From somewhere in my mind I know I could have brought up a mental picture of a glossy, two-toned, chromium-striped '56 car with power steering. But it would have taken a real effort, and — I can't really explain this, I know — it was as though modern cars didn't really exist; not yet. These were today's cars, parked all around me, and I knew it.

  I walked on, just strolling down Main Street, glancing at an occasional store window, enjoying the incredible wonder of being where I was. Then, half a block or so behind me, I heard a sudden little babble of voices, and I looked back and the movie was letting out. A little crowd of people was flowing slowly out onto the walk to stand, some of them, talking for a moment, while others crossed the street or walked on. Motors began starting, the parked cars pulling out from the curb, and I heard a girl laugh.

  I walked on three or four steps maybe, and then I heard a sound, utterly familiar and unmistakable, and stopped dead in my tracks. My Jordan's motor had caught, roaring up as someone advanced the spark and throttle, then dying to its chunky, revving-and-ticking-over idle. Swinging around on the walk, I saw a figure, a young man's, vague and shadowy down the street, hop into the front seat; and then — the cutout open — my Jordan shot ahead, tires squealing, down the street toward me.

  I was frozen; I just stood there stupidly, staring at my car shooting toward me, my brain not working; then I came to life. It's funny; I was more worried about my car, about the way it was treated, than about the fact that it was being stolen. And I ran out into the street, directly into its path, my arms waving, and I yelled, Hey! Take it easy! The brakes slammed on, the Jordan skidding on the bricks, the rear end sliding sideways a little, and it slowed almost to a stop, then swerved around me, picking up speed again, and as I turned, following it with my eyes, I caught a glimpse of a girl's face staring at me and a man my age at the wheel beside her, laughing, his teeth flashing white, and then they were past and he yelled back, You betcha! Take it easy; I always do! For a moment I just stood staring after them, watching the single red taillight shrinking into the distance; then I turned and walked back toward the curb. A little part of the movie crowd was passing, and I heard a
woman's voice murmur some question; then a man's voice, gruff and half-angry, replied, Yeah, of course it was Vince; driving like a fool as usual.

  There was nothing I could do. I couldn't report a car theft to the police, trying to explain who I was and where they could reach me. I hung around for a while, the street deserted again, hoping they'd bring back my car. But they didn't. Finally I left and just walked the streets for the rest of the night.

  I kept well away from Prairie Avenue. If I was where I knew I was, my grandmother, still alive, was asleep in the big front bedroom of our house, and the thirteen-year-old in my room was the boy who would become my father. I didn't belong there now, and I kept away, up at the north end of town. It looked about as always; Hylesburg, as I've said, is old, and most of the new construction has been on the outskirts. Once in a while I passed a vacant lot where I knew there no longer was one; and when I passed the Dorsets' house, where I played as a kid with Ray Dorset, it was only half built, the wood of the framework looking fresh and new in the dark.

  Once I passed a party, the windows all lighted, and they were having a time, noisy and happy, and with a lot of laughing and shrieks from the women. I stopped for a minute, across the street, watching; and I saw figures passing the lighted windows, and one of them was a girl with her hair slicked close to her head and curving down onto her cheeks in sort of J-shaped hooks. There was a phonograph going, and the music — it was “China Boy” — sounded sort of distant, the orchestration tinny, and different, I can't explain how. Once it slowed down, the tones deepening, and someone yelled; and then I heard the pitch rising higher again as it picked up speed and knew someone was winding the phonograph. Then I walked on.

  At daylight, the sky whitening in the east, the leaves of the big old trees around me beginning to stir, I was on Cherry Street. I heard a door open across the street and saw a man in overalls walk down his steps, cut silently across the lawn, and open the garage doors beside his house. He walked in, I heard a motor start, and a cream-and-green '55 Oldsmobile backed out — and I turned around then and walked on toward Prairie Avenue and home and was in bed a couple of hours before my folks woke up Sunday morning.