Time and Again

by Jack Finney

  Anyway, it was good. The others had come into the house; Byron Doverman just as I was finishing, and then Maud Torrence, each stopping to admire and praise before going on upstairs. Aunt Ada came in from the kitchen to call upstairs, saying dinner would be on the table in five minutes. She admired the drawing too, and then insisted, since I was still here, that I stay for dinner. And unless I wanted to look as though I were running from Jake, leaving Julia to face him alone, I had to stay, and I said I would; the harm, if any, was already done. I was afraid, I realized—I didn't know what the hell this guy might do—but I was curious, too. Still admiring her portrait, Julia looked up at me and asked me to sign it. I took it, fumbling in my pocket for the pencil, trying to figure out what to say: I couldn't just write my name and nothing more. Then I thought, "In for a penny, in for a pound," or whatever the saying is, and I wrote "For Julia—Affectionately, admiringly," mentally adding, And to hell with you, Jake, and signed my name. In the time I'd been here I'd thought almost not at all of Rube Prien, Dr. Danziger, Oscar Rossoff, Colonel Esterhazy, or even the project itself; they were motionless in my mind, at the small far-off end of the telescope, dwindled and remote. But at dinner they turned real again: what were they going to think of what I'd have to tell them? That I'd disturbed and interfered in events with inexcusable clumsiness? Probably; and maybe they'd be right, yet I didn't know how I could have avoided it. The talk at dinner was all of Guiteau, with a little weather, and I wasn't interested. For me now, Guiteau was once again only a name in an old book; tried, executed, and long forgotten, the world I was preparing myself for hardly even knowing his name anymore. I sat eating mechanically, trying to look as though I were interested, responding when spoken to. But as the project and the people in it returned to life in my mind, I began to recede from this time and place.

  I was jerked back into it. We were finishing dinner, Maud Torrence already finished, politely waiting for the others before leaving the table; Felix finishing his bread pudding; Byron holding a cigar, ready to light it as soon as he stood up; the rest of us drinking coffee. We didn't hear the front door open but we felt the draft, the invisible balloon of cold air touching our ankles. I saw Julia, her aunt, and Felix across the table suddenly look up into the parlor, and I turned, with Byron and Maud, to look too.

  He was standing in the center of the room directly under the multiple flames of the chandelier, staring in at us—confronting us like a bear on his hind legs. Still wearing his unbuttoned overcoat, his top hat still far back on his head and shining dully under the overhead light, he stood with his arms dangling straight down, fingers limp, shoulders deeply bowed, head thrust forward. He just stood there, swaying a little again, and we had time to see that he'd been hurt, apparently; that his tie was gone, his shirt collar open and slightly torn, that the first couple of studs below it were gone too, and that across his chest the soiled white of his shirtfront was speckled with blood. We even had time—sitting there motionless, staring across the tabletop or turned in our chairs—to see that the speckles of blood were growing, small spots enlarging, bigger ones expanding, then joining. He was still bleeding—it took a moment or so to understand and formulate the thought—then Julia cried, "Jake," her voice frightened and concerned, and she stood up so quickly the back of her knees knocked her chair over backward, and I noticed, foolishly, that it made very little sound toppling onto the carpet.

  She started around the table toward him; now we were all pushing chairs aside, getting to our feet. But Jake flung both hands up and out, fingers spread like claws, halting us, freezing us where we stood—Julia motionless at a corner of the table, the rest of us half standing or sinking back into our chairs. Through a moment or two he looked at us, his teeth bared, yellow and strong-looking. Then his hands moved to his chest, each hand gripped an edge of his shirtfront, then pulled the bloody shirt apart, exposing his chest. It was hairy at the sides, black and matted, but more sparsely at the center, the skin there very white and visible under the separate hairs. He wasn't wounded or hurt; not accidentally, that is, and not very much. The blood swelling out of his skin in slow drops that, no longer blotted up by the cloth of his shirt, enlarged now and rolled down out of sight came from dozens and dozens and more dozens of needle pricks.

  Incredibly, his chest was newly tattooed; with five blue-black letters at least two inches high. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity or protest or squeeze my eyes shut and pretend this wasn't happening; I didn't know what I wanted to do or what I felt—but the tattooed letters on his chest spelled Julia. He said, "All my life now, I will bear this,'' and he tapped his chest, He said, "Nothing can ever remove it. Because all of my life you will belong to me, and nothing can ever change that." He looked at us, his eyes moving across all our faces; then he turned, and with absolute dignity walked toward the hall and the stairs to his room, and I didn't want to laugh. It was an absolutely absurd gesture, an almost inconceivable action in the century I was used to. But not here. Here and now, there was nothing absurd about it. There couldn't be: This man meant it.

  Julia was hurrying across the dining room, paler than ever now; then, running a little, she crossed the parlor, and we heard her running steps up the carpeted stairs. I'd left my packed bag in the hallway, my coat and hat hanging on the big mirrored stand there, and I didn't stay; I wasn't needed. I turned to Aunt Ada, said I had to leave immediately, and she smiled distractedly, shaking my hand across the tabletop, and murmuring good wishes. I said goodbye to the others, who replied with their eyes flicking toward the staircase in the hall. And then I was outside, walking toward Twenty-third Street.

  At Lexington Avenue I took a hansom cab and sat back with my eyes closed. I had no interest at all just now in anything outside. I paid off the cab at Fifty-ninth and Fifth Avenue, where Kate and I had come out of Central Park. And now I walked back into it, and then along the paths, under the occasional lights, heading north and west through the dark unchanging park; and presently, ahead, I saw the gabled bulk of the Dakota, its gaslighted windows, and the flickering candle and kerosene lights of the truck farms beside it.

  16

  I gave myself a vacation next day. I convinced myself I deserved it and I knew I needed it: needed a transition between the two worlds and times. I'd slept in the Dakota apartment, and while I doubted that I had to do this anymore, I induced a light hypnosis just before going to sleep. Lying in the darkness in the big carved-wood bedstead in the same nightgown I'd worn at 19 Gramercy Park, I knew that far downtown the old post office stood, its lobby lighted by a few globed gas jets; that the big thermometer in its narrow wooden sentry-box stood before Hudnut's Pharmacy in the darkness of lower Broadway, probably registering close to zero with no one to look at it now; that a few tiny locomotives were following the beams of their kerosene headlamps along the El tracks over the cobbled late-at-night streets of New York. But in the morning, I told myself, I would awaken back in my own time. I began to wonder how I'd feel about that this time, but you're entirely relaxed in self-hypnosis, more than halfway to sleep, and before I could really begin thinking I was asleep all the way.

  In the morning, lying in bed for a few moments after opening my eyes, I felt certain I knew where and when I was, and several seconds later had proof. I heard a sound I knew but couldn't place for an instant: a far-off, high and faintly ominous whine. Then I said it aloud—"A jet"—but I hadn't really needed that sign: I already knew I was back, I could feel it.

  Walking out of the Dakota onto Seventy-second Street half an hour later, I turned west, on my way to the warehouse and project, I thought. And then without any previous thought and without knowing why, I swung around, walked back to the street corner, and turned south.

  I walked for block after block after block then, down through modern Manhattan—looking no different in my round fur cap, long overcoat, and my beard, mustache and long hair, than many another man I passed. I knew I ought to at least phone the project, and Kate. But instead I did what I wanted to do: I wa
lked downtown, pausing momentarily at curbs to wait for flashing red DON'T WALK signs to turn green and say WALK; and I looked around me at today's streets, buildings, and people.

  There is an astonishing amount left in New York of other times. You don't think so of New York, but once you're out of midtown Manhattan it's true. And presently, below Forty-second Street, I began to recognize buildings, and whole groups of buildings, that had survived from the eighties and earlier. But these weren't the similarities I was hunting for now; I was looking for them in people's faces, and I'm obliged to say I found hardly any.

  I'm certain it wasn't a matter of clothes, of makeup or its absence, or of hair styles. Today's faces are different; they are much more alike and much less alive. On the streets of the eighties I saw human misery, as you see it today; and depravity, hopelessness, and greed; and in the faces of small boys on the streets I saw the premature hardness you see now in the faces of boys from Harlem. But there was also an excitement in the streets of New York in 1882 that is gone.

  It was in the faces of women moving along the Ladies' Mile and into and out of those splendid lost stores. Their faces were animated, they were glad to be just where they were, alive in that moment and place. It showed in the faces of the people I saw in Madison Square. You could look at their eyes as they passed and see the pleasure they felt at being outdoors, in the winter, in a city they liked. And the men of lower Broadway hurrying along the walks, conscious of time and money, stopping at noon to check the precision of their big watches with Western Union's red time-ball—well, their faces were often abstracted; some were worried; some were greedy or anxious, others complacent and going-to-live-forever. All sorts of expressions just as today, but they were also interested in their surroundings, pausing to check the temperature at Hudnut's giant thermometer. And above all, they carried with them a sense of purpose. You could see that: They weren't bored, for God's sake! Just looking at them, I'm convinced that those men moved through their lives in unquestioned certainty that there was a reason for being. And that's something worth having, and losing it is to lose something vital.

  Faces don't have that look now; when alone they're blank, and closed in. I passed people in pairs or larger groups who were talking, sometimes laughing, occasionally more or less animated; but only as part of the group. They were shut off from the street around them, alien and separate from the city they lived in, suspicious of it, and that's not how New York was in the eighties.

  I tested my impression. At Twenty-third Street I turned west, and walked to within half a block of Madison Square. Then I stood on the curb out of the way of pedestrians and looked at it, up ahead. From here it looked the same, physically. And people passed through and around it. But no one, and I'm certain you could see this, took any particular pleasure in it. New York was once a different place, and in many many ways.

  Except for its uptown side, which was all solid apartments now, Gramercy Park was precisely the same, and so was Number 19. Once more now I stood on the walk looking up at it. There were lowered Venetian blinds in the first-floor windows but no other change I could see, and it seemed impossible that Julia and her aunt weren't somewhere inside it doing their morning's work. For once I let myself act on impulse before it had a chance to fade. I ran up the steps, and—another difference, but I shut my mind to it—pushed the electric bell. After fifteen seconds or so just as I was changing my mind, a woman opened the door and stood looking at me, brows lifted questioningly. She had thick white hair tied back off her forehead by a band; she was in her forties, I thought, but with a girl's figure, and she wore orange-colored pants, a matching turtleneck sweater, and a vest of some sort of silvery cloth. She looked very nice, and I pulled off my hat, and said, "I'm sorry, but—I knew the people here once. Some years ago. A Miss Julia Charbonneau and her aunt. But I can see they don't live here now."

  "No," she said pleasantly. "We've lived here nine years, and the people before us were here for four; and their name wasn't Charbonneau."

  I nodded, as though it were to be expected, as it certainly was. I was postponing the moment of leaving so that I could look into the hall, and she very politely stepped aside a little so that I could see better. The walls were papered in a fragile-looking blue pattern on white, and a magnificent crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. The hall looked expensive and utterly different, except for the black-and-white-tiled floor; that was the same.

  She didn't ask me to look at the rest of the place, of course; not in New York. And I smiled and nodded to show I'd seen enough, thanked her, and left. I don't quite know why I went there; I just wanted to see it, that's all. I walked back to Twenty-third Street, and took a cab to the project.

  In nearly every possible way the atmosphere at the project was different this time. The man at the door in the tiny street-level office was Harry, or so it said in red stitching over a breast pocket of his white-coverall Beekey uniform. He sent me up alone in the elevator to Doc Rossoff's office, as instructed, he said, if I should show up here. But there was only Oscar's nurse when I arrived, the big good-looking woman with the gray in her hair. She smiled and greeted me and asked the usual questions but I detected a lack of real interest, I thought; probably to be expected. She had me wait in Oscar's office; she'd phone him, she said, and he'd be here very quickly.

  As he was, walking swiftly in four or five minutes later, his hand moving out to shake mine, greeting me just as he had done before, congratulating me, asking questions, his voice eager—except that it wasn't the same either. He was abstracted, I realized after I'd talked for a minute or so, only half listening to my answers, sometimes nodding absently before I'd finished a reply. I soon had the feeling that he wanted to get rid of me, anxious to hurry back to whatever he'd been doing. Because he hustled me off to the "debriefing" room without even an offer of coffee, which wasn't like him, and there'd been a Silex half full on his office hot-plate.

  The differences continued. This time none of the others had come hurrying into Oscar's office to see me. And Oscar left me at the door of the debriefing room, asking me to dictate a brief but complete account of this last visit, gave me a clap on the shoulder, and hurried off. Inside the room there was only the technician who ran the recorder. He was threading in a new roll of tape, and he just said hi, and nodded. A moment or so later the girl who made the transcript on the electric typewriter came in, smiled at me meaninglessly, and I sat down and talked an account into the little microphone on my chest of what had happened with me during the previous two days, making it brief but omitting nothing. That done, I began reciting my random list of names, facts, and anything else that might be verifiable that came into my head.

  After twenty minutes I asked where everyone was, and the guy who sat watching the recorder reels, occasionally fiddling with the dials, said they were having a big meeting; it had begun yesterday, and continued today. That both explained and did not explain, and I realized I was experiencing a childish feeling of neglect.

  He kept me at the debriefing twice as long this time. After forty-five minutes or so I said I'd run dry but he said he'd been instructed to ask me to keep at it, if I could, for a couple of hours—an hour and a half at least. We all three got some lousy instant coffee from a machine just outside in the corridor, then stood around for a few minutes forcing it down, talking over the weather lately, about which I wasn't much help. I had the impression that they'd been told not to question me about this visit because they didn't mention it, and after five minutes we resumed the debriefing. I kept it up for over an hour and a half, though with longer and longer pauses. For as long as two or three minutes, after a while, I'd have to search my mind for something else to add. About every twenty minutes or so the tall bald man who'd done this before came in, and took away whatever the girl had typed.

  Finally Oscar Rossoff came back. I was nearly finished, scraping the bottom of the barrel. When he opened the door I was just speaking the name of a boy I'd last known in seventh grade when he'd move
d away and whom I hadn't thought of again till this moment. Oscar sat down—he looked tired, his shirt collar unbuttoned, his tie pulled down—and sat waiting, staring morosely into a corner of the room. I said that Arizona had been admitted to the Union as a state in 1912; then I stood up, stretching, and said I was finished absolutely.

  The girl typed the last of what I'd just said, and pulled the sheet from her machine. The recording technician stopped the tape, snapped and broke the tape between the two reels, and took off my reel. Oscar said, "Tell Freddy to wait till he's completely finished before he reports, okay?" And they nodded, and left.

  He gestured to a chair beside him, I sat down, and he said, "We're in a meeting, Si; a great big fat one. It looks as though we may wash out the whole project, I don't know yet. We want you in the meeting but I have to brief you first; no need to interrupt it for that. It's simple enough. We haven't bothered you with this, but other attempts have been going ahead, too, both during your own and before. The Vimy Ridge attempt failed. There's a section of battlefield there left untouched since World War One: Franklin Miller came out of a dugout where he'd waited in the mud with an infantry platoon through a four-day simulated artillery bombardment, and fighting body lice. Real ones. But what he came out onto was nothing but a great stretch of empty fields, the barbed wire rusted and the trenches caved in, half a century after Armistice Day. He's already back home in California.

  "To everyone's surprise and even astonishment, the Notre Dame attempt may have succeeded. For something less than even a full minute, before he lost his mental grip on the situation and was instantly back in the here and now. But we think—I'll tell you all about this sometime—that during the space of maybe half a dozen deep excited breaths he was standing on the banks of the Seine at three o'clock one morning in the winter of 1451; Jesus. And the Denver attempt succeeded absolutely. Ted Brietel stood in the little corner grocery store drinking a bottle of pop he'd bought, chatting with the proprietor. Then he walked out into Denver, Colorado, 1901, no question about it; just like you. And he was debriefed like you after half a very careful day there. That's what the meeting is about, Si; we were at it till one thirty last night, and back at it by eight forty-five this morning." Oscar frowned, squeezed his eyes shut, and dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to rub away a headache or a bad night's sleep or both.