by Jack Finney
"Nineteen Gramercy Park," the man said, climbing in; then the cab door slammed, I heard the driver cluck at his horse, heard the reins crack, and stood watching the cab pull out and into the thin stream of wavering lamps and lanterns. I turned to Kate, but she was staring at the walk.
At the base of a curbside wooden telegraph pole lay a half oval of snow out of the pedestrian path, protected by the pole and still untouched. The patch of snow lay just within the circle of pale light from a streetlamp, and at the edge of the patch, sharply and clearly impressed in the snow, was a replica in miniature of the tombstone whose photograph Kate had shown me over the grave of Andrew Carmody outside Gillis, Montana.
Almost matter-of-factly Kate murmured, "It's impossible." She looked up at me. "It's impossible!" she said again, her voice suddenly angry, and I knew what she felt; this was so far from any sensible explanation that it made you mad, and I nodded.
"I know," I said. "But there it is." And there it still was; we bent forward to stare at it. All we could do was stand looking at that shape in the snow; straight-edged at bottom and sides, the top perfectly rounded in a cartoonist's tombstone shape, and, in its interior, the design formed of dozens of tiny dots, a nine-pointed star contained in a circle.
The cab was long gone when I looked up, lost in the traffic and dark. I stood staring, eyes narrowed, but I wasn't looking after it. A second or so before, above the iron rattle of the thinning Broadway street traffic, I'd heard a sound, a familiar sound at the very edge of my attention, and now I realized what it had been. I said, "Kate, would you like a drink? In front of a great big fire?"
"Yes. Oh, my God, yes," she said, and I took her arm, and we walked half a dozen yards ahead to the corner. Across the street one of the illuminated signs framing the streetlamp read BROADWAY, the other PARK PLACE. And a short block west on Park Place I saw the source of that familiar clackety-racketing sound. Its three tall slim windows were lighted redly, the familiar gabled shape of its roof black against the night sky: There, perched over the street, was an El station like an old old friend.
We crossed Broadway—it wasn't hard now, the traffic sparse—and on the other side I turned to look back. This was a dark city, but just beyond the rear of the post office on the far side of City Hall Park I saw a five-story building that still stands in twentieth-century New York. But now the upper floors were brilliant with the light of hundreds of gas jets. Carved in the stone of the side of the building, clearly readable in the light streaming out the upper windows, was THE NEW YORK TIMES. They were up there now—I could walk back, climb a wooden staircase, and actually see them—derbied reporters scribbling in longhand; dozens and dozens of typesetters in sleeve protectors standing in long rows plucking type letter by letter from wooden cases, their hands blurred by motion as they set every word, sentence, paragraph, column and page of what would presently be, ink still wet, tomorrow morning's New York Times. They were there now as I stared across the darkness at those brilliantly lighted windows, preparing a paper I might already and long since have seen brown and crumbling at the edges, lying forgotten in an old file. I shivered, turning away, and we walked on a short block to the El station.
As I climbed the steps, even the ironwork of the railings seemed wonderfully familiar. I'd visited New York often as a boy, ridden the El many times. And now here again, inside the little station, were the bare worn floorboards, the wooden tongue-and-groove walls, the little scooped-out wooden shelf projecting from under the change-booth window, grained and polished from ten thousand hands. There was a cuspidor on this floor and the station was lighted by a single tin-shaded kerosene ceiling lamp. But even the dimness was familiar; as late as the 1950's I'd been in stations just like this.
I shoved two nickels in through the little half-moon hole at the bottom of the wide-meshed grill between me and the mustached man in the booth. He took them without looking up from his paper, and shoved out two printed tickets. Then we walked out to the platform, and for just an instant it was once again a tiny shock to see the dozen or so passengers: the women in skirts that nearly brushed the platform, wearing bonnets and shawls, some carrying muffs; and the whiskered men in their derbies, silk hats, and fur hats, smoking cigars, carrying canes. Then a whistle toot-toot-tooted, a high happy sound, we turned to look down the tracks, and I was astounded. Martin had told me, shown me pictures, but I'd forgotten; a short, squat, toy locomotive was chuff-chuffing toward us, red sparks flaring into the night from its miniature stack. Its brakes grabbed, the chuff-chuff slowing, white steam jetting from its sides, and the train—engineer leaning out its side window—slid into the station and on past us.
There were three cars, enameled light green and trimmed with gilt arabesques. Inside, seats ran the length of the car; they were upholstered in brown, and at intervals along the backs New York Elevated Rail Road was elaborately woven into the cloth; there was a kerosene ceiling lamp at each end of the car. We'd hardly sat down before a conductor in a low-crowned, flat-brimmed uniform cap came through, walking fast, collecting tickets.
The car was nearly filled, but once more I was used to the way people looked, and glancing at Kate's face, I could see that she was, too. It didn't pop into my mind that the brown-bearded man directly across the aisle from us might be going to a wedding; the shiny silk topper he wore was the hat he wore every day, of course, like many another man in this very car. Next to him, staring absently into space, sat a woman wearing a navy-blue scarf tied under her chin, brown knit shawl, a long dark-green dress, and—I caught a glimpse—between the end of her skirt and the tops of her black button shoes she wore heavy white knit stockings with broad horizontal red stripes. But I could see more than the clothes now; I could see the girl who wore them. And see that in spite of the clothes she was young and pretty. I even thought I could tell—I don't know how, but I thought so—that she had a nice figure.
Kate was nudging me. "No ads." She nodded toward the spaces over the windows.
I looked, and said, "I wonder how long before some genius thinks of them?"
We'd taken a right-angled curve to the left almost immediately after starting up, then a curve to the right a block or so farther on. I didn't know where we were, or what street we were over now. But we were heading in the right direction, steadily and rapidly north, stopping for only seconds at each station. We were no longer curious about the people around us, but just sat staring out the windows. We were facing west, and looking past the shiny topper of the man opposite, I peered through the shiny window out at the strange nighttime New York sliding past us.
There were lights, thousands of them, but of no brightness: these were thousands of tiny flecks affecting the darkness not at all; they were gaslights, most of them, white at this distance and almost steady; but there was candlelight, too, and, I supposed, kerosene. No colors, no neon, nothing to read, just a vast blackness pricked with lights, and all of them, I realized, below us. This was a Manhattan in which we looked out over the rooftops, its tallest structures the dozens of church spires silhouetted against—yes, the Hudson River, just becoming visible under a rising moon. A few minutes later—we couldn't see the moon, but it was higher now—the river brightened, its dark surface glinting, and suddenly I saw the darker bulk of sailing ships anchored offshore, and the silhouettes of their bare masts. I shivered then, staring out that window at the strangeness of the city flowing past. This was Manhattan and there lay the Hudson, but I was a very long way from anything I knew.
We got off at the last stop, Sixth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, only a block from where we'd come out of Central Park this afternoon. We crossed the street and again entered the park, walking through it silently, postponing anything we had to say till we reached the sanctuary of the Dakota; we could see it far ahead, towering alone against the moonlit sky.
Then Kate and I sat in my living room, our second drinks in our hands: good stiff drinks, whiskey and water. The fire was going again, and we'd said, and then said once more, all there
was to say about the blue envelope and the man who'd mailed it, and the tiny image of the Gillis tombstone marked in the snow. Now, after a little silence, I said, "What's the one single thing of all you saw that made the strongest impression? The streets, the people? The buildings? The way the city looked from the El?"
Kate took a sip of her drink, thinking, then said, "No; their faces." I looked at her questioningly. "They aren't like the faces we're used to," she said, shaking her head as though I were disputing her. "The faces we saw today were different."
I thought possibly she was right, but I said, "An illusion. They dress so differently. The women have hardly any makeup. The men have beards, chin whiskers, side-whiskers—"
"It's not that, Si, and we're used to beards. Their faces are actually different; think about it."
I sipped at my drink, then said, "You may be right. I think you are. But different how?"
We couldn't say, either of us. But staring at the fire, sipping my drink and remembering the faces we'd seen—on the bus, the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue, on the El, in the gaslighted marble-and-dark-wood lobby of that strange vanished post office—I knew Kate was right. Then I realized something: "Vanished," I'd just said to myself, and I looked over at Kate. Testing her impression, I said, "Katie, where are we? What's outside the windows right now? Are we in 1882 still?"
For a moment she considered it, then shook her head.
"Why not?"
"Because..." She shrugged. "Because we came back, that's all. We were finished, so we came back to the apartment, and we came back in our minds, too." Suddenly doubtful, she said, "Haven't we?"
We got up and, glasses in hand, walked over to the windows and looked down into the blackness of Central Park, hesitating. Then we leaned forward and, foreheads touching the windowpane, looked straight down into the street. And saw the long string of traffic lights, red as far as we could see in both directions. They all flicked green, the cars starting up, and a cab horn shrieked in rage at a car speeding out of the Park to beat the light at Seventy-second. I turned to Kate, shrugging, lifting my drink to finish it. "Yep," I said. "We're back."
11
We'd inevitably begun calling it my "debriefing," and I sat as I'd done before, a microphone hung on my chest, reciting names and random facts onto tape. As I spoke, I watched the people who sat or stood leaning against the walls; every one of them was staring at me. My voice droned on, the muffled clatter of the electric typewriter accompanying it, and they watched me, knowing I was different from all of them now. Staring back at them, so did I.
Rube was there in faded, very clean sharply pressed army pants, and shirt without insignia. He lay tilted back in a molded-plastic chair, hands clasped behind his head, looking at me. He grinned when our eyes met once, quirking a mouth corner and shaking his head in mock awe and wonder, his eyes filled with friendly aching envy. Dr. Danziger just stood there, his great hands hung on the lapels of his double-breasted brown suit; his eyes, blazing with fierce joy, never left me. Colonel Esterhazy, neat and cool in a gray suit, stood against a wall, a hand clasping a wrist, regarding me thoughtfully. The Columbia and Princeton history men were there, too; so was the U.S. senator, several others I'd met, and even three or four neatly dressed strangers.
After I'd finished we waited in the cafeteria for forty minutes or so. I sat with Rube, Danziger, and Colonel Esterhazy, and had three, maybe even four, cups of coffee. Every chair at the other tables was occupied, and people were sitting on the radiator cover against the far wall. I had to respond to a good many jokes from people pausing at our table, most of them being questions about whether I'd bought any Manhattan real estate at bargain prices. Oscar sat down with us for a minute. He said, "What one thing hit you the hardest?" and I tried to tell him about the man, the living actuality of the man, who had sat opposite us on the bus, and who might have remembered Andrew Jackson as President. Oscar sat nodding, smiling a little; he knew what I meant. As soon as he'd left, Rube leaned toward me and said, " 'Us'? Who else was there, Si?" and I told him there were one or two other passengers on my side of the bus.
The tall bald man of the day before came hurrying in, the room going silent as he stopped at our table. Grinning, he said that everything they'd been able to investigate so far had checked out okay. He felt certain now that the rest would, too, and the room broke into an excited gabble.
At one fifteen the board assembled, I sat at an end of the long conference-room table, and for the fourth time today I began describing what had happened. Every chair at the table was filled, and along one side there was a second row of folding chairs, all occupied. As far as I could tell, looking around the table as I talked, everyone I'd met here before was here again today plus at least a dozen others I didn't know. One of them, Danziger told me later, was a personal representative of the President.
Again I spoke in the singular, saying nothing about Kate. I'd have to tell Danziger what she'd done but I wanted to do that when we were alone. I described every move I'd made, every sight I'd seen and sound I'd heard, the room silent. Something like two dozen men sat around that table or on the folding chairs and no one coughed or glanced away from me. It may be that some of them lighted cigarettes during the twenty minutes I spoke, or sat back in their chairs, shifted position, crossed their legs; I expect they did. But my impression was of motionless silence, complete except for my voice, and of a focused concentration on me so absolute I felt I was talking with a kind of invisible searchlight bathing me in the glare of their attention.
I finished, then sat answering questions for half an hour more. Mostly, whatever the specifics, it was the same unanswerable question: What was it like? What was it really like? And now they were restless. They stirred, frowned, whispered, lighted cigarettes. Because no matter how I tried or how complete the detail, I couldn't give them the essence of what had happened to me; the mystery remained.
One set of questions, the senator's, had a tone different from the others. For reasons I don't understand he was antagonistic. It was as though he suspected or thought it was a possibility at least that I might be hoaxing them. I suppose it wasn't an unreasonable suspicion under the circumstances, though no one else showed it. But the senator, for example, didn't remember his grandfather's ever mentioning the kind of bus I'd described. He sat looking at me shrewdly then, as though he'd caught me. All I could do, of course, was shrug politely and reply that nevertheless that's what I'd seen. I suspect he was simply following the politician's sleazy instinct to protect himself in case something later went wrong. Presently Esterhazy cut in on him smoothly with some minor question, and then forgot to give him the floor back. He simply thanked me, and asked if I'd mind keeping myself available here in the building till the meeting ended. When I said yes, of course, he thanked me again, and I understood that I was dismissed, and left. There was actually a little applause as I walked out, and my face flushed.
I sat forever in Rube's office then, turning the pages of old copies of Life, discovering again, as in a doctor's waiting room, that it's very hard to tell, looking through back issues of Life, whether or not you've seen them before. I looked through a Playboy, a copy of the U.S. Infantry Journal, and I walked out once and down the corridor to the cafeteria for a Coke I didn't want. Rube's girl came in twice, wanting to know, of course, what it had been like, really like, and once again I did my damnedest to find the words that would convey it. It was after four o'clock when she came in the third time. She'd just gotten the call: Could I come back to the conference room, please?
I've never really walked into a jury room after they've been locked up for hours, but I think this must have been like it in appearance and atmosphere. The room was air-conditioned so it wasn't full of smoke, but the ashtrays overflowed and the air smelled of cigarettes. And ties were pulled down now, coats were off, note pads were doodle-filled, crumpled paper balls lay on the table, and I noticed a pencil snapped in half; faces were set, some actually sullen. Esterhazy stood up as I came in, smiling
affably, looking unruffled. His suit coat was still on, his tie and shirt neat as ever. He gestured me to the chair I'd had before, waited till I'd sat down, then he sat down too, resting his forearms on the tabletop, his hands loosely clasped, very relaxed.
He said, "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting like this; you must be quite tired, physically and mentally." He sounded as though he meant it, and I murmured a polite response. I realized that I'd expected it would be Danziger who'd speak, and I glanced down the table at him. One big hand lay on the tabletop at the edge; his chair was pushed back from the table as though—the thought popped into my mind—he were disassociating himself from the meeting. Did he look angry? No, I decided; actually his face was expressionless. There was no way to know what he was feeling or thinking; he might only be tired. Esterhazy was talking. "We have had to hear, wanted to hear, every shade of opinion in reaching a decision as important as the one"—he looked slowly around the table—"that we are now agreed upon."
Then he smiled and sat looking at me for a moment or so, and I had the sudden feeling that he was interested in me as a person as well as just someone who'd done what I had. "Your first 'visit,' if that's the term, couldn't have been more cautiously made. No one so much as glimpsed or heard you, and no least trace of your brief presence was left behind. There was no interference whatever in even the smallest events of the past, and you had no effect upon it. But your second visit—deliberately, by design—was more bold. Again you made no interference with events, except"—he unclasped his hands to raise his forefinger, a West Point lecturer requiring attention—"that your very presence was an event. A tiny one, but this time people saw you, and spoke to you, momentarily at least. What trains of thought might possibly have resulted? Influencing events that followed in what ways, large or small? It was a danger and a profound one, but"—soundlessly striking the table with his fist, he emphasized each slow word—"if is a risk already over and past. We accepted the risk, the full report is now in, and once again there is no least evidence that your presence affected subsequent events in even the slightest way."