Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  The temptation had always been there, nagging at him: now unthinkingly he glanced down past his left side and in the blackness saw a fleck of grayed whiteness appear, expand shapelessly, then fracture and vanish. For an instant he didn’t understand, then did: that fleck, silently expanding to thumbnail size, had been a breaking whitecap, and he said, “Jesus,” then, “Oh, Jesus,” and could not move. Eyes squeezing shut, he clung motionless and frozen to the handholds; and high in the darkness four hundred feet above the black ocean he stood wondering in bewildered panic at the impossible remoteness of this moment from the evening the Night People began.

  • • •

  CHAPTER ONE

  • • •

  On the evening the Night People began, Lew was in Jo’s apartment; she had to work. He lay on the chesterfield in Levi’s and a green-checked shirt, leafing through The New Yorker, looking at the cartoons, and she sat at her draftsman’s table, ruling in shapes on a sheet of bristol board.

  Lew turned the last page, then closed the magazine on his chest, and lay watching Jo: her brown hair hung before her face like a curtain, brushing the white cardboard, her hands moving deftly in the circle of hard white light from the cantilevered lamp head. Lew tossed the magazine into the air, pages fluttering, and Jo looked up, swinging her hair aside. His arms straight overhead, one hand behind the other, he began rhythmically pumping them up and down, fingers opening and closing. Jo said, “Okay, I’ll ask: What are you doing?”

  “Hypnotizing God.”

  “I’ll inquire still further: Why?”

  “It’s worth a try.” He lowered his arms, hands clasping on his chest. “It could solve all my problems.”

  “What problems, you don’t have any problems.” She resumed her rapid, precise drawing. “Your work’s going all right. At least you said.”

  “Sure. It is. Splendidly, nay, brilliantly.” Eyes lazy, he watched her hand slide a needle-pointed pencil along the metal edge of her ruler. His hair was black, his brown eyes almost black, and he wore a mustache and trimmed sideburns to just above his ear lobes. Glancing up again as she spoke, Jo liked the way he looked in just this moment.

  She said, “And we’re okay. I think.” A folded architectural drawing hung tacked to a corner of her board, and Jo read a measurement from it, scaling it down in her mind on a mental blackboard. She murmured, “Don’t say, Yes, we’re fine, Jo.’ Lightning would strike.”

  “We’re fine, except for a few of your sickening habits such as constantly picking your nose.”

  “Well, okay, then let God alone.”

  “Right-oh!” Lew snapped his fingers at the ceiling. “Sir! Come out of it now!” He rolled off the chesterfield onto his feet, and stood looking around the room. A yard-wide strip along this wall contained Jo’s one-dimensional living room, her “espaliered living room,” Lew said. In this strip stood an upholstered chair, a standing lamp, the chesterfield and a glass-topped table beside it, the rest of the room being work space. On the opposite wall her olive-drab supply cabinet stood pushed against the fireplace; her long paste-up table stood in the center of the room; the tilt-top table at which she now sat stood directly beside the glass doors to the outside balcony.

  Lew walked to the supply cabinet. Lined up in three rows on its top stood some fifteen or so miniature buildings, each no larger than the palm of a hand: some awninged stores and turn-of-the-century small-town houses, a collapsing shed and old barn, a bridge of weathered wood, a stone-fronted brick-sided little bank building. These were the beginnings of what in time was to become “Jo’s Town,” new buildings added at long intervals. Lew stood touching the perfect little cardboard structures, cautiously admiring them with his fingertips. Each took hours of work, and Jo wasn’t sure she’d ever finish the town. What purpose it was eventually to have or where it could be laid out complete with streets, back alleys, a stream, and outskirts, she didn’t know; it was to have as many as a hundred buildings.

  Lew turned to the built-in book shelves beside the balcony doors. Jo’s cassette player and recorder stood on the bottom shelf, cassettes lying tumbled in a green shoe box beside it, and he squatted to poke through them, glancing at titles.

  But he picked up none of the cassettes, and stood again to sidle through the partly opened balcony doors out onto the narrow wooden balcony. This overlooked a strip of planted earth and, beyond that, a winding two-lane road greenly lighted at long intervals by street lamps. Forearms on the railing, hands clasping, he stared out at the empty street, and after a moment said, “Well, there it is: Strawberry Drive. Silent. Motionless. And of no interest whatsoever.” A pause. “Of no interest to us, that is. Those of us who live here now. In 1976.” This was the bottom floor of a two-story gabled redwood building of four apartments in suburban Marin County just across the Bay from San Francisco; several similar buildings lay on each side. Ahead, beyond the far curb, stood an irregular row of tall eucalyptus trees. In the darkness beyond these, and down a slope, lay the tennis courts and swimming pool which were one reason they lived here. Beyond them, the blackness of the Bay.

  “But to someone of the future, a sociologist a hundred years from now, what a stunning, nay, priceless moment. To actually be here! Back in 1976! To look out at this long-vanished, forgotten street and see”—the headlights of a car appeared at a bend to Lew’s right—“yes, here comes one now, a car!” Head turning, he followed its approach. “Something of which he has only read, seen only in old photographs, remote as a Roman chariot. But now here it is, in solid actuality, rolling along the street . . . passing under the quaint street lamps of the period . . . following the curious markings down the center of the ‘road.’ What was that painted line for, do you suppose?”

  “Lew, what are you doing?”

  He turned to face Jo, leaning back against the rail. “Opening up my senses. Responding to my environment. The way us modern folk is s’posed to do. I am the eye of the future.” He pushed forward from the railing, side-stepped through the narrow opening, and turned to Jo’s casette player again. “Where’s your microphone?”

  “There somewhere.”

  He found it behind the shoe box and plugged it in. “You got a cassette you don’t want?”

  “Any of them behind the recorder.”

  He took one, snapped it in, pressed the rewind button, and watched the tape whir back to its beginning. He pressed the recording buttons and, microphone at his lips, stood thinking for a moment. “To you of the distant future,” he said, then, “greetings! From us of the remote lost past. I speak to you from a time, a date, whose very sound will be antique to your ears: August the twenty-sixth . . . 1976! As I speak these words, you are unborn. But as you hear them, I am long dead. Who am I? Lewis Joliffe is my handle, pardner, and I am . . . nobody. Buried. Long gone. Forgotten.”

  “Jesus,” Jo murmured.

  “And with me in this distant time is the lovely Josephine Dunne: sloe-eyed, lustrous-haired, soft of skin. As I speak, that is. Back in 1976. But as you listen, she, too, is dust. Long since passed into wrinkle-skinned, trembling old age. Then buried deep. And now even the granite that once marked her final resting place is cracked, fallen, and crumbling into nothingness.”

  “Hey, cut it out!”

  “That was her very own voice! From a century ago! We are still gloriously alive now, vibrant with youth. I am a—well, not so tall, maybe, but a spectacularly handsome fellow of twenty-nine: charming, witty, incredibly attractive to women, and master of foil and épée. Jo is magnificent, the eyes of a blue-eyed fawn, fine brown hair, big-titted and high-assed, a good-looking kid. Claims to be several years younger than I am, though she doesn’t look it. Also claims to be half an inch taller, which is a lie, a tricky optical illusion achieved by deceit, about which I expect to make a public announcement soon, perhaps a major address. I am a lawyer, an attorney, and if you don’t know what that is, congratulations two-thousand-and-seventy-six, and I hope your tricentennial is better than our bi-. Jo is a free-lan
ce architectural-model maker; makes terrific little models of our quaint old buildings, and if one has survived to your time, as paper so often survives frail flesh, it may be in your attic right now. If her signature is on the bottom, you’re rich!

  “But what of you? Who are you, and what are you like? Do you really wear those funny-looking pajamas they have in ‘Star Trek’? Alas, we can never know. And so from a century ago we say . . . farewell!” He held the microphone at arm’s length, and repeated softly as though from a great distance, “Farewell . . .” Then he thrust the microphone at Jo. “Say good-by to the folks in the twenty-first century.”

  She leaned across her table. “So long. Hope things improve in the next hundred years.”

  Leaving the tape winding, steadily erasing whatever else had been on it, Lew pulled the microphone cord, and stepped out onto the balcony to walk quickly along it to his own apartment next door. At Jo’s insistence—she had to have a workroom, she said—they had rented these side-by-side apartments, although Lew had argued: in San Francisco they’d shared the top-floor apartment of a large Victorian. But there she’d had an entirely separate workroom. Here, she said, they couldn’t both live in the small space left over. Besides, it might be a good idea, she thought, for each to have a place whenever one of them wanted, needed, or ought to be alone.

  Lew was back, dropping onto the chesterfield, a wide-mouthed metal thermos bottle under one arm. He sat thumbing quickly through a packet of white-paper squares, then said, “Yeah, this one,” holding it up.

  It was a color photograph: Jo and Lew in tennis clothes, standing at the net holding their rackets high. She said, “Yes, I’ve seen it; Harry took it. It’s good of us both. But what—”

  She stopped: Lew had lifted off the wide screw top of the thermos, and dropped the photo into the jug. “Time capsule. Stainless steel; it’ll last forever.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He hopped up, walked to the recorder with the thermos, and stood watching the winding tape. “Why not? We made the tape, why waste it? Soon as it’s ready I’ll bury it outside somewhere, with the photo; they’ll want to know what we looked like.” He smiled. “God knows who’ll find it, or when. It could be a hundred years; really. Two hundred. What a find. Imagine the excitement. You’ll be immortal, kiddo.” The machine clicked, the reels stopped, and Lew punched the STOP key, and lifted out the cassette. “Anything on the other side?” Jo shook her head, and Lew held the cassette between thumb and forefinger over the mouth of the jug. “Anything you want to add? Your justly famous rendition of ‘Ave Maria’? Your recitation of ‘Gunga Din’?” She shook her head, and he let the cassette fall, clinking, into the jug. “Now you belong to the ages.” He began screwing on the cap. “One of the tiny handful of names remembered down the long corridors of time: Shakespeare, Einstein . . . Washington and Lincoln . . . Agnew and Nixon . . . Joliffe and Dunne. I hope you’re grateful.” He tightened the lid, twisting hard.

  “Where you going to bury it?”

  “I don’t know, where do you think? By the tennis courts?”

  She shook her head. “They’ll be building more apartments there eventually, you know they will.”

  “How about next to the road by the curb? No, they’ll be widening the road, too: damn it, I don’t want the thing dug up in the next fifteen minutes. Where’s a good place?” He stood frowning, then looked up at Jo. “You know something? There isn’t a single place—not the beaches, not a cemetery, not out in what’s left of the country, and not home plate in Candlestick Park—that you can really be certain won’t be all screwed up in the next few years, let alone a hundred. We ain’t gonna be immortal at all.”

  “I always suspected it.” Jo resumed her work.

  Lew shook the cassette out of the thermos and put it back on the shelf. “Well, I’ll go on back to my place—you’re working, and I don’t want to disturb you.” He smiled at that, and so did Jo, without looking up. “Hope I sleep tonight.”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned to the balcony doors and stood sideways in the opening. “I’ve been waking up every once in a while. For no reason. Mostly when I’m at my place. Middle of the night, and my eyes pop open. Then I lie there.”

  “Why don’t you come over?”

  “No, this is like two or three o’clock; you don’t wake up so good then.”

  “Get up anyway.” With an X-acto knife she began cutting out one of the shapes she had drawn. “My father says that if you can’t sleep you should hop right up and read or something. Till you get chilled.”

  “He also says, ‘Another day, another dollar.’ ”

  “That’s right.” This was an old routine. “And, ‘If it were a snake, it would bite you.’ ”

  “A wise man. I’ve noticed that many of his pithy observations have been widely copied. Well, if this happens again, may what’s-his-name forbid, I’ll try it.”

  It happened again six hours later, in the way Lew was almost used to lately. At one moment he lay quietly asleep; in the next, his eyelids opened. For several seconds he lay blinking, looking across the room at the night shape of his bedroom window, the glass yellowed by the moon. Then he got up.

  Barefoot and in pajamas, he sat at the living-room television, waiting. A bar of white light shot across the screen, and he watched it expand, his mustached face pale and black-stubbled in the livid light. But no sound began, no picture appeared. Through click after click of the dial the screen remained white, the set humming, all stations off the air for the night.

  Lew turned off the set, and sat watching the little diamond of light shrink down. When it was nearly gone, a silver speck, he did it again; turned the set on, then off, to watch the needle point of light slide away. He reached out, turned on his desk lamp, and looked at the several piles of paperback books stacked on the shelves helter-skelter, just as he’d lifted them from the mover’s carton months before. But he didn’t want to read at this time of night, and he got up, rolled back the glass doors to the balcony, and stepped out.

  The air slightly chilly, he stood, forearms on the railing, hands clasped, looking out at the silent street. This was the same street, the same scene, he’d stood here looking at six hours earlier, yet now it seemed different. A high waxing moon shone almost straight down, the shadows of the eucalyptus branches across the road motionless on the pavement. The moon-washed asphalt looked white, and he could see pebbles and their shadows. A mist of green light from the street lamp tinted the branches beside it a stagy green.

  Nothing stirred, there was no sound, and something in him responded to this dead-of-night stillness. This was his own familiar street, winding along the shoreline of the Bay in the suburban area of Mill Valley called Strawberry. In the months he and Jo had lived here he’d have driven this road hundreds of times, seen every hour of its twenty-four. But always in a car, insulated from it. Now, greenly lit, motionless and silent, the road seemed a new place, mysterious and strange, and the impulse flared up in him to go out onto it and see what it was like in the deserted middle of the night.

  In his bedroom he pulled denims and a blue windbreaker over his pajamas, sneakers onto bare feet, picked up a red ski cap. At his outer door, hand on knob, he turned back into the living room; and at his desk he printed a note in heavy black felt-tip letters on a sheet from the lined legal pad he kept there: Jo—Couldn’t sleep, went for walk, back soon. Amos Quackenbush. Leaving the desk lamp on, he taped the note to the balcony door, seeing his own reflection in the glass. The tasseled cap lay jauntily on the back of his head, exposing a heavy wing of black hair across his forehead, and he thought, Pierre, ze Canadian lumberjack. The rolled-up cap front could be pulled down as a wind mask; he did this, and in the shiny black glass saw himself turn into a sinister figure. The expressionless parody of a face patterned with streaks of yellow at cheeks and forehead suggested an African mask, and he rolled it up again.

  Out on the curb facing the street, Lew st
ood for a moment. Across the road the great trees seemed bigger than in daytime, hugely silhouetted against the lighter sky, and the silence was absolute. He stepped out, turning left, hearing the faint scuff of his rubber soles on the asphalt. Along the horizon across the Bay, towering banks of clouds hung white in the moonlight, a gigantic background for the winking lights of a silent plane, and a rush of exhilaration at being out here shot through him.

  Passing the first of the houses beyond the row of apartment buildings, Lew looked up at their dark windows, and glanced at a row of curbside mailboxes, silvery in the moonlight. Reading the name lettered along the side of the first of them, he raised hand to mouth, and in a mock shout called, “Hey, Walter Braden! Come on out, and play!” He felt excited, gleeful, and began to jog, shadow-boxing, swiping thumb to nose. From somewhere far behind him he became aware of a sound, an infinitely remote whine barely touching the air, and he stopped to listen.

  For the space of a breath he thought it was a far-off siren, then recognized it: a diesel truck tooling along the distant freeway a mile behind him beyond the intervening hills. Lonely as a train whistle, the high, insectlike drone grew, deepening, as Lew stood motionless. It held . . . receded . . . was gone . . . returned momentarily, even more remote . . . then vanished utterly, and he walked on, smiling.

  On around a long bend past the dark silent houses, then the lower branches of a tree across the street suddenly brightened, he heard the approaching car, and without thought or hesitation stepped up onto the lawn beside him. The engine-mutter growing, the pavement lightening, Lew sat down quickly in the black shadow of a large pine, drawing up his knees, leaning into its trunk, his hand on the lawn coming to rest against the waxy hardness of a baseball-sized pine cone. Headlight beams abruptly rounded the curve, lean pebble shadows streaking forward, immediately shortening and vanishing, and Lew yanked down the mask front of his cap.