Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  “Well,” he now said impatiently to Martha, who seemed frozen in position, “are you finished?”

  “It’s Elliot,” she repeated stupidly, still not focusing her eyes.

  “I know that, Martha,” Hunsicker said, reaching. “I’d like to talk with him, if you don’t mind.”

  “He’s dying,” Martha said.

  “He’s joking.”

  “He has AIDS,” Martha said, in a tone of controlled reason. “That’s why he was in Paris, you see: to try a new treatment.”

  “No,” Hunsicker said firmly. “That’s not possible. Elliot’s too brilliant to contract a lethal disease. This can’t be serious. I want to hear about Paris and the meals he ate there. Is he coming up for dinner on Saturday?”

  Martha’s expression was still more blank than anguished: that was what gave him such hope that all this was illusion. “We can’t get to the hospital till tomorrow,” she said. “Visiting hours would be over before we reached town.” At last she hung up the telephone. “There’s stew. You should eat something. I’m not hungry, and I can’t sit down right now.”

  Hunsicker clutched at her. “Please believe me: this does not have to happen! I can get it changed.”

  “Walter,” his wife said wearily, “try to get hold of yourself. I’m going to take a pill now and try to sleep.”

  “No, no that isn’t—” But she had not stayed to listen, had instead gone upstairs and into the bathroom. He realized that there was no credible means by which the truth could be revealed to her at this point, if ever.

  II

  NEXT MORNING after a sleepless night behind the wheel of his car, Hunsicker drove to the city. From 8:50 on, he knocked at the door of the medical-equipment shop, but not until 9 sharp did the little man let him in.

  In the back office he related the terrible news. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you as seriously as I should have yesterday. I need your help.” He leaned forward. “I’ll do anything to save Elliot’s life.”

  “Including changing the past so that he never existed?”

  “It wouldn’t be possible just to go back and change him?”

  The little man gasped in disapproval. “My goodness, you can’t exercise a line-item veto when it comes to these matters: you have to take the package. If you’d like a heterosexual son, you’ve got to take what else comes with him. He could be mentally impaired, for example. Or he might have other carnal tastes that are abhorrent, even criminal. Also, if the past were changed in this respect, there would be consequences: if you replace Elliot with another son, you’ll necessarily change your wife as well: flesh of her flesh, you see. That could not be changed.”

  This was not a shock to Hunsicker by now: it was one of the things that had kept him awake through the night—though to be sure he could not envision a life in which Martha had never been: something different from her suddenly dying.

  “It’s simply that I can’t condemn him to a horrible death. He’s not at fault: we made him. That was all our idea. Martha would do what I’m doing if she could. I know that. As it happens, only I have the power.” He would have wept now, had he not felt the need to give his son a tribute. “Let me tell you about Elliot: he would stop me if he knew about this. That’s the sort of man he is. If given the choice, he’d rather die this way than have the past changed so that his mother would never have existed for me. Elliot’s the most generous person I have ever known. He was like that as a little child. For that matter, he might even prefer his current fate to never having existed. He so loves life! He has never slunk about in shame, nor did he ever make a spectacle of himself. He was what he was, a sweet man, an ethical man, a fine man.” Now at last he let the tears come.

  The medical-equipment dealer was embarrassed by this display, and spun round in the chair and fetched the spooled paper from the appropriate slot of the rolltop desk.

  He turned back. “All right, what will it be?”

  After a moment Hunsicker was able to speak again. “I’m beginning to understand what a responsibility this can be. I’m scared of making a bad mistake…. Is there a rule against your choosing something for me?”

  The little man scowled at the ceiling and shook his head.

  “I won’t blame you if it turns out badly,” Hunsicker said earnestly. “It’s just that this thing has really shattered my confidence. And by changing the past, I end up in effect killing my son anyway, don’t I, as well as my wife? I’m saving them a lot of suffering, and therefore it must be done. But I’m giving up most of my own life, as I knew it, and stepping into the unknown…. I’m sorry. I’m being ungrateful. I’m aware that this is a unique privilege.”

  “Please,” said the other, with a lifting of wrists. “Don’t say such things. We’re not doing you a favor. It’s just an agreement, fair and square. You do your part, we do ours. There’s no need to be grateful or humble.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this all night,” said Hunsicker. “Changing my whole life! I don’t know how or where to start.”

  “Loosen up a little. You’re forgetting that the decision need not be permanent. This is not as solemn as you are making yourself believe.”

  “I’ve always taken life seriously,” Hunsicker said. “I hope I’ve not been humorless, but existence has never seemed like a joke to me.”

  “Maybe you’ve been wrong,” said the little man. “You might do worse than to try the lighter approach.”

  Hunsicker considered the matter. “Yes, that first brief experience as the rich slumlord and lecher wasn’t exactly light-hearted, was it? It was too concerned with the ugly assertion of power. You might be right. But wouldn’t it be mockery of my reason for being here? To flee tragedy into farce?”

  “You really ought to free yourself from those old ways of looking at things” the little man said. “What other people have told you all your life might not be the whole truth but rather a version that will further their own ends with no regard whatever for yours. You are here being given the opportunity to arrange something on your own terms. You’ll waste it if you insist on inconsequential considerations. Your object at the moment is to do away with your son’s fatal illness. What difference would it make however you accomplished this end?”

  Suddenly Hunsicker’s burden seemed to have been lifted. “Okay, I’ll try being Jack Kellog again, this time with a sense of humor.”

  The little man made a notation on the wretched scrap of paper and returned it to the cubbyhole. It was incomprehensible to Kellog that an organization with sufficient resources to develop a means of changing the past would have such a squalid office, but that was not his business. He could have no complaint as long as the process was working.

  KELLOG’S COMIC talents had appeared with his adolescence and a concomitant gain in weight that, by the middle of his freshman year in high school, had made him much chubbier than one could be and have much social success in the routine way. Not to mention that the morning came when he woke up with a face that was badly pimpled. (When his acne finally went away with the end of his pubescence, moonlike craters remained as a memory of the lesions.) He had no talents at sports, nor was he a good student. He masturbated four times a day, week in and week out, often into successive pairs of women’s panties shoplifted from the lingerie department of a five-and-dime (he would have paid for these could he have done so gracefully). In any kind of competition with persons of his own age, he was at a loss; in any conflict he was likely to prove the coward. Yet, in spite of so many negative attributes, his determination to prevail remained undiminished—something he could not himself understand, and he was always careful to conceal it from others, with the exception of his parents, to whom he was wont to predict great personal success for himself when the time was ripe.

  “I’m holding my breath,” his father, a clerk, would say derisively, “so don’t take too long.” He had the dreariest parents of anybody he knew: no wonder that gaining distinction was a hard row to hoe.

  Then one day, after a
rain, he slipped on some wet leaves and performed an accidental pratfall to the asphalted surface of the schoolyard. At first it seemed unfortunate that he was at the time amidst many of his homeward-bound schoolmates, all of whom, having no other distraction at the moment, laughed uproariously. He was no stranger to the derision of a few persons at a time, but the response to what could be termed a real audience was unique to him, and far from being crushed by their laughter, he hungered for more of it. He proceeded to fall three more times before reaching the limits of school property, doing so now on purpose, and on each occasion making a more elaborate thing of it than he had on the last: throwing his books into the air, kicking off his loafers at the moment of impact, finally producing a shattering Bronx cheer that simulated a fart—the best effect of all, for though most of the girls professed to be disgusted by this, everybody made some kind of reaction, and Kellog, who had heretofore experienced far more disregard than condemnation, realized that he had stumbled upon a principle essential to him who seeks acclaim from his fellows: viz., that even to inspire derision is to have made one’s mark.

  Now other people in groups no longer averted their heads on his approach, nor as individuals did they continue to find pressing engagements elsewhere. They stayed, often greeting him with an expectant smirk. After taking the pratfall to its limits without putting himself into the hospital—he did suffer a sprain, and was lucky it wasn’t worse, when trying to add to one plunge a leap-twist that could only have been performed by a gymnast—he turned towards the verbal for his comedy. In this he exceeded himself. He had always been inarticulate in the written language, and writing themes and book reports was nightmarish. (“Black Beauty is the story of a horse. This horse is black, and real nice. Some people arnt so kind to horses, but luckily some people are.”) Nor when called upon in class to respond vocally was he more eloquent, translating Caesar’s dying words as “Brutus, you also are a brute,” sniggering and blushing. But now he found that putting words in certain combinations could make people laugh. Of course there was more to it than the context. Some comedy (usually successful despite or because of the revulsion it evoked) was founded simply on bad taste: most schoolboy sex jokes were of this character (“The Reverend Fluff, a minister of the gospel, is putting it to the choirmaster’s daughter in a parked car, when a policeman pokes a flashlight into the window. ‘Officer,’ indignantly says the preacher, ‘I’ll have you know I’m Pastor Fluff!’ ‘Buddy,’ replies the cop, ‘I don’t care if you’re all the way up her a-hole, you gotta move on.’”) And sometimes there was virtually no point at all, nothing to laugh at whatever, except foul language (‘“How can you tell if a girl will put out?’Joe the jerk asks Vic, the local authority on nooky, whose answer is, ‘If she talks dirty.’ So next time Joe sits on a couch next to a girl he asks her, ‘What would you do if a bear came down that chimney there?’ ‘I’d shit,’ says she. ‘Let’s fuck,’ says Joe.”)

  Timing was crucial. The same joke, hilarious when told with the proper intervals between its elements, was lame when poorly timed (e.g., when one bum asks another, “Did you shit in your pants?” the question must be preceded by the visible and audible sniffing of the joke-teller, pause; and then a longer pause comes before the answer …“Today?”). And other acting skills were helpful: being able to suggest the bodily movements of a spastic; to produce accents (“Vot are you doink, children?” “Fucking, Mamma.” “Dot’s nice, just don’t fight,” or as Rastus addressing the blacksnake which crawled in a torn pocket and out his fly: “Ah knowed you was black, and ah knowed you was long, but ah nevah knowed you had eyes!”); to simulate the facial expressions of those with strabismus, harelips, and receding jaws.

  You couldn’t, however, use blue material with parents or teachers, or even, given the era, with “good” girls as opposed to those who were “bad,” those, that is, who went beyond necking and engaged in mutual “petting” or even, in some cases, more. To entertain the respectable, Kellog therefore had to acquire a repertoire of hygienic jokes of the sort encountered in magazines in the dentist’s waiting room or heard on the radio, but the trouble was everybody saw or heard those, and it was devastating to be beat to the punch-line by your audience. That was the trouble with jokes as such: once uttered, they were available to all, and it was precisely the funniest ones that were most repeated, so you always ran the risk of either not getting a laugh or, getting one, being identified as not original. Kellog would have liked to be socially acceptable in the routine way, namely, without making an especial effort, but as that had proved impossible, what he craved now was to be unique, superior to the herd, a headliner, the one-and-only, and that could hardly come about with twice-told material.

  But it was one thing to want to invent a joke, and another to do it. Where do you begin? If not restrained by prudery in the matter of sex and prudence with respect to your audience (not all of whose affiliations might be known to the comedian), a headstart could be gained by using real or implied foul language or bigot’s epithets: “‘Oh, how I love Dick,’ said Richard’s girl.”… “A nigger goes into a drugstore to buy rubbers. The druggist is this slick little sheeny…” But if obliged to keep a civil tongue in your head, you had to work much harder to arrive at something that was sufficiently biting to amuse but at which even the victim could not protest without attracting more derision. Fat people were God-given perfection, the ultimate; but eminently usable were the bald, the nearsighted, the bowlegged and the knock-kneed, those with impedimented speech, the effeminate male, and the unmarried female over forty.

  Cruelty might not necessarily be funny, but nothing was funnier. This became clear to Kellog before he was out of his teens, but it was also evident to him that he had little gift for invention. He could tell jokes, even perform them with the vocal effects and bodily movements of a trained actor, but he could not cut one from the whole cloth. Soon he had to buy by mail, for twenty-five cents, a book entitled The World’s Hundred Best Jokes and then its sequel, 100 More, etc., and believed he could breathe easy for the moment with this stockpile behind it. But as ill luck would have it, one of the new acquaintances he had made through the exercise of wit plucked one of these volumes from the pocket of Jack’s raincoat and held it high. “Hey, look where Kellog gets his jokes!”

  But being so exposed had less effect on his other classmates than he at first had feared. In spite of the entertainment he had afforded them for months, most were indifferent to its sources. He was the one who got the laugh when he grabbed the other boy’s right hand and thrust it aloft. “Hey, look where Riggins gets his lovin’: Miss Rosie Palm!” He was helped by a blush of Riggins’ that was so violent as to seem a prelude to hemorrhage, for by chance the straitlaced girl on whom Riggins had a crush was standing nearby at the time and though a reaction of disgust on her part would have been regrettable, her simper of amusement was disastrous: in the passion of self-pity Riggins upon the moment suspected her of not being the virgin he had supposed but rather a kind of slut, who would perhaps put out to anyone who applied, and took her to the movies and tried to feel her up. She made a scene in the theater, from which Riggins was thereupon banned for life, and next her father threatened to thrash him and subsequently almost came to blows with Gordon Riggins, Sr., after which the two families, friendly for a generation, became enemies.

  And no one thought of blaming Jack Kellog, the only begetter of this calamitous sequence. Riggins in fact became, at least in his own mind, Kellog’s best friend.

  “I ain’t any good with words, Jack. It don’t matter with guys, but I just don’t know how to talk to girls.”

  Ordinarily Kellog would have responded, callously, with the gag about the bear coming down the chimney, but Riggins had uniquely addressed him by his first name, and he was moved.

  “Huh. That’s tough, Gordo.”

  “See,” Riggins said from his urinal, next to the one being used by Kellog, “what I was thinking, that’s your specialty, talkin’: you got a million of ‘em.
I don’t care if they come from books, you know how to tell a joke. That one you told the other day, Jesus, it was real funny: the old coon seein’ the snake crawlin’ out of his pants and thinkin’ it’s his dick? I tried to tell that one to my old man, after supper that night, but you know what? I couldn’t do it. I just can’t get that nigger-talk right.” He had finished peeing and was violently whipping his peter in the air, to dry it. “He slapped my face, anyway: he’s the only one allowed to tell a dirty joke.” Riggins punched his large fists together. “I tell you, I’m bigger’n him now. I could trim his ass any old day.”

  Kellog was on the last button of his fly; it was his other pair of pants that had the zipper. In a slightly superior tone, as befitted an expert, he said, “Whoever you’re talking to, you got to act like you’re in charge whether you are or not. You can’t let them think you’re uncertain. And don’t let ‘em rush you. And you have to get the words exactly right. For some reason, the same joke ain’t funny if you stumble over just one word, They’ll make fun of you for your mistake and won’t laugh at the joke itself.”

  “I don’t know,” Riggins said dolefully. “I just get tongue-tied.” He knew no need to wash his hands, even though Kellog was providing a good example. As the latter was reaching for a paper towel, Riggins said, “What I was wondering, maybe you could put in a word for me with Betty Jane Hopper. Know what I mean? Crack a few jokes—clean ones, nothing dirty. She goes to Sunday school every week. Then work in someplace that I like her, that Gordon Riggins thinks she’s neat.”