Catherine slipped off her shoes, reclined on the sofa, and napped until Doug Archer knocked at the door.
Before he left, Doug Archer said a strange thing.
His visit went well, otherwise. He was friendly and his interest seemed genuine, more than just businesslike. He asked about her work. Catherine was shy about her painting even though she had begun to earn some money through a couple of small Seattle galleries. She’d taken fine arts courses at college, but the work she produced was mainly intuitive, personal, meticulous. She worked with acrylics and sometimes with montage. Her subjects were usually small—a leaf, a water drop, a ladybug—but her canvases were large, impressionistic, and layered with bright acrylic washes. After her last show a Seattle newspaper critic said she “seemed to coax light out of paint,” which had pleased her. But she didn’t tell Archer that; only that she painted and that she was thinking of doing some work here during the summer. He said he’d love to see some of her work sometime. Catherine said she was flattered but there was nothing to show right now.
He was thorough about the house. He inspected the basement, the water heater and the furnace, the fuseboard and the window casements. Upstairs, he made a note about the oak floors and moldings. Lastly, he went outside and gazed up at the eaves. Catherine told him Gram Peggy had had the roof inspected every year.
She walked him to his car. “I suppose we’ll have to put it on the market pretty soon. I don’t even know what that involves. I guess people come to see it?”
“We don’t have to hurry. You must be upset by all this.”
“Dazed. I think I’m dazed.”
“Take as long as you need. Call me when you’re ready to talk about it.”
“I appreciate that,” Catherine said.
Archer put his hand on the door of the car, then seemed to hesitate. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Did your grandmother ever talk much about her neighbors?”
“Not that I remember. I did meet Mrs. Horton from around the corner. Apparently they used to drive to the mall together.”
“How about the house down the other direction—the man who lived there? She ever mention him? This would have been ten or more years ago.”
“I don’t remember anything like that. Why?”
“No real reason.” Something personal, she guessed. He was obviously embarrassed to have asked. “Will you do me one favor, Catherine? If you notice anything strange happening, will you give me a call? My number’s on the card. You can reach me pretty much anytime.”
“What do you mean, anything strange?”
“Odd occurrences,” Archer said unhappily.
“Like what? Ghosts, flying saucers, that kind of thing? Is there a lot of that around here?” She couldn’t help smiling.
“Nothing like that. No, look, forget I asked, okay? It’s nothing important. Just kind of a hobby with me.”
He thanked her, she thanked him, he drove away. How odd, Catherine thought as his car vanished into the tree shadows along the Post Road. What an unusual man. What a strange thing to ask.
She didn’t think more about it. A bank of clouds moved in and a steady, sullen rain fell without interruption for most of a week. Catherine stayed in the house and began to itemize some of Gram Peggy’s possessions, room by room. It was depressing weather and depressing work. She felt lost in this big old house, but the rhythms of it—the ticking of the mantel clock and the morning and evening light through the high dusty windows—were familiar and in their own way reassuring.
Still, she was glad when the sun came out. After a couple of warm days the ground had dried and she was able to move around the big back lawn and some distance down a trail into the woods. She remembered taking some of these walks with Gram Peggy and how intimidating the forest had seemed— still seemed, in fact. There was enough red cedar behind the house to make her feel very small, as if she’d shrunk, Alice-style, to the size of a caterpillar. The trail was narrow, probably a deer trail; the forest was cool and silent.
She took these walks almost every day and before long she began to feel a little braver. She ranged farther than Gram Peggy had ever taken her. Some of this woodland was municipal property, and farther east it had been staked out by the timber interests, but nobody up along the Post Road cared too much about property lines and Catherine was able to wander fairly freely. Most days she hiked south down the slope of the hill, keeping east of the road and the houses.
She bought a guidebook and taught herself to identify some of the wildlife. She had seen a salamander, a thrush, and something she believed was a “pileated woodpecker.” There was the tantalizing possibility of encountering a black bear, though that hadn’t happened yet. Sometimes she brought her lunch with her; sometimes she carried a sketchbook.
She had already found favorite places in the woods. There was a meadow where she could sit on a fallen log and gaze across a thicket of salal and huckleberry, where the forest sloped away toward Belltower. There was a sandy spot by a creek where she thought she might scatter Gram Peggy’s ashes. And another meadow, farther south, riddled with deer trails, where an abandoned woodshed sagged under a growth of moss.
The woodshed fascinated her. There was something inviting about the cockeyed slant of the door. Surely there was nothing inside, Catherine told herself; or only a cord of moldy firewood. But then again there might be an old plough or spinning wheel, something she could clean up and peddle to the antique shops in Belltower. Unless this was somebody’s property, in which case she would be stealing. But she could at least peek.
She had this thought vaguely in mind Wednesday morning, her second week in Belltower, when she packed a bag lunch and went wandering. It was a warm day and she was sweating by the time she passed the creek. She pressed on south, paused to tie her hair up off her neck, hiked past the huckleberry thicket and on down to the woodshed in its sunny meadow.
She approached the door of the ancient structure, high-stepping through berry-bush runners to avoid a stand of fireweed … then she hesitated.
It seemed to her she could hear faint motion inside.
Curiosity killed the cat, Gram Peggy used to say. But she always added the less salutary rider—Satisfaction brought it back. Gram Peggy had been a big believer in satisfied curiosity.
So Catherine opened the creaking woodshed door and peered inside, where a stack of newspapers had moldered for decades, and where something hideous moved and spoke in the darkness.
Eleven
How did it feel to begin life over again, thirty years in the past?
Giddy, Tom thought. Strange. Exhilarating.
And—more often now—frightening.
It wasn’t clear to him when or why the fear had started. Maybe it had been there all along, a subtler presence than now. Maybe it had started when he moved into the house on the Post Road, a steady counterpoint to all the raucous events since. Maybe he’d been born with it.
But it wasn’t fear, exactly; it was a kind of systematic disquiet … and he felt it most profoundly on a hot Thursday afternoon in July, when he could have sworn, but couldn’t prove, that somebody followed him from Lindner’s Radio Supply to Larry Millstein’s apartment.
The day had gone well. Since he’d taken this job Tom had turned in enough reliable work that Max mainly left him alone. The cavernous back room of Lindner’s had begun to feel homey and familiar. Hot days like this, he tipped open the high leaded windows to let the alley breezes through. He was working on a Fisher amplifier a customer had brought in; the output tube had flashed over and one of the power-supply electrolytics was leaking. The capacitors were oil-filled, the kind eliminated under an EPA edict—some years in the future—for their PCB content. The danger, at least at this end of the manufacturing process, was far from mortal. At lunch, Max asked him why he kept the fan so close to his work. “I don’t like the smell,” Tom said.
Toxins aside, Tom had developed a respect for these old Americ
an radios and amplifiers. The up-market models were simple, well built, and substantial—the sheer weight of them was sometimes astonishing. Iron-core transformers, steel chassis, oak cabinets, a pleasure to work with. The job was underpaid and offered absolutely no opportunity for advancement, but for Tom it functioned as therapy: something pleasant to do with his hands and a paycheck at the end of the week.
And still—long since the novelty should have worn off— he would look up from his soldering at the calendar on the wall, where the year 1962 was inscribed over a picture of a chunky woman in a lime-green one-piece bathing suit, and he would feel a dizzy urge to laugh out loud.
What was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank. And yet, here he was—almost thirty years down a road that shouldn’t exist; in the past, where nobody can visit.
He was no younger than he had been and he was nothing like immortal. But time had been suborned and that made him happy.
“You’re always looking at that calendar,” Max said. “I think you’re in love with that girl.”
“Head over heels,” Tom said.
“That’s the calendar from Mirvish’s. They use the same picture every year. Every summer since 1947, the same girl in the same bathing suit. She’s probably an old lady now.”
“She’s a time traveler,” Tom said. “She’s always young.”
“And you’re a fruitcake,” Max explained. “Please, go back to work.”
Certain other implications of this time travel business had not escaped him.
It was 1962 in New York. Therefore it was 1962 all over the country—all over the world, in fact; therefore it was 1962 in Belltower, Washington, and both his parents were alive.
Somewhere in the Great Unwinding—perhaps at step number forty-eight or sixty-three or one hundred twenty-one in the tunnel between the Post Road and Manhattan—a log truck had swerved backward up a mountain road; a bright blue sedan had vaulted an escarpment onto the highway; two bodies had shuddered to life as the dashboard peeled away from the seats and the engine sprang back beneath the hood.
In 1962, in Belltower, a young GP named Winter had recently opened a residential practice serving the middle-class neighborhood north of town. His wife had borne him two sons; the younger, Tommy, had his fourth birthday coming up in November.
They are all living in the big house on Poplar Street, Tom thought, with Daddy’s offices downstairs and living quarters up. If I went there, I could see them. Big as fife.
He pictured them: his father in a black Sunday suit or medical whites, his mother in a floral print dress, and between them, maybe a yard high in baby Keds, something unimaginable: himself.
One morning when Joyce was off doing restaurant work and he was home feeling a little lonely, he picked up the telephone and dialed the long-distance operator. He said he wanted to place a call to Belltower, Washington, to Dr. Winter’s office on Poplar Street. The phone rang three times, a distant buzzing, and a woman answered. My mother’s voice. It was a paralyzing thought. What could he possibly say?
But it wasn’t his mother. It was his father’s nurse, Miss Trudy Valasquez, whom he dimly remembered: an immense Hispanic woman with orthopedic shoes and peppermint breath. Dr. Winter was out on call, she said, and who was this, anyway?
“It’s nothing urgent,” Tom said. “I’ll try again later.”
Much later. Maybe never. There was something perverse about the act. It felt wrong, to disturb that innocent household with even as much as an anonymous call—too tangled and Oedipal, too entirely strange.
Then he thought, But I have to call them. I have to warn them.
Warn them not to go traveling up the coast highway on a certain date some fifteen years from now.
Warn them, in order to save their lives. So that Tom could go to med school, as his father had insisted; so that he wouldn’t meet Barbara, wouldn’t marry her, wouldn’t divorce her, wouldn’t buy a house up the Post Road, wouldn’t travel into the past, wouldn’t make a phone call, wouldn’t warn them, wouldn’t save their lives.
Would, perhaps, loop infinitely between these possibilities, as ghostly as Schroedinger’s cat.
This was the past, Tom told himself, and the past must be immutable—including the death of his parents. Nothing else made sense. If the past was fluid and could be changed, then it was up to Tom to change it: warn airliners about bombs, waylay Oswald at the Book Depository, clear the airport lobbies before the gunmen arrived … an impossible, unbearable burden of moral responsibility.
For the sake of sense and for the sake of sanity, the past must be a static landscape. If he told Pan Am a plane was going to go down, they wouldn’t believe him. If he flew to Dallas to warn the President, he’d miss his plane or suffer a heart attack at the luggage carousel. He didn’t know what unseen hand would orchestrate these events, only that the alternative was even less plausible. If he tried to change history, he would fail … that was all there was to it. Dangerous even to experiment.
But he thought about that call often. Thought about warning them. Thought about saving their lives.
It was hardly urgent. For now and for many years to come they were alive, happy, young, safer than they knew.
But as the date drew closer—if he stayed here, if he lived that long—then, Tom thought, he might have to make the call, risk or no risk … or know they had died when he could have saved them.
Maybe that was when the fear began.
He slept with these thoughts, woke chastened, and rode the bus to Lindner’s. He regarded the girl on the calendar with a new sobriety. Today her expression seemed enigmatic, clouded.
“You’re still in love with her,” Max observed. “Look at her face, Max. She knows something.”
“She knows you’re a lunatic,” Max said.
He lost himself in his work. The day’s biggest surprise was a call from Larry Millstein: apologies for the incident at the party and would he come over that afternoon? Meet Joyce at the apartment, the three of them could go to dinner, make peace. Tom accepted, then phoned Joyce to make sure she was free. “I already talked to Lawrence,” she said. “I think he’s reasonably sincere. Plus, you’re too popular these days. Avoiding you is beginning to interfere with his social life.”
“Should I be nice? Is it worth the trouble?”
“Be nice. He’s neurotic and he can be mean sometimes. But if he were a total loss I would never have slept with him in the first place.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“You both like jazz. Talk about music. On second thought, don’t.”
He left the shop at six. It was a warm afternoon, the buses were crowded; he decided to walk. The weather had been fine for days. The sky was blue, the air was reasonably clean, and he had no reason to feel uneasy.
Nevertheless, the uneasiness began as soon as he stepped out of Lindner’s front door and it intensified with every step he took.
At first he dismissed it. He’d been through some novel experiences in the last few months and a little paranoia, at this stage, was perhaps not too surprising. But he couldn’t dismiss the uneasiness or the thoughts it provoked, memories he had neglected: of the tunnel, of the machine bugs, of their warning.
He recalled the rubble in the sub-basement of the building near Tompkins Square. Someone had been there before him, someone dangerous. But Tom had passed that way safely, and his anonymity would be guaranteed in a city as vast as New York—wouldn’t it?
He told himself so. Nevertheless, as he walked east on Eighth toward Millstein’s shabby East Village neighborhood, his vague anxiety resolved into a solid conviction that he was being followed. He paused across the street from Millstein’s tenement building and turned back. Puerto Rican women moved between the stoops and storefronts; three children crossed the street at a fight. Ther
e were two Anglos visible: a large, pale woman steering a baby stroller and a middle-aged man with a brown paper bag tucked under his arm. So who in this tableau was stalking him?
Probably no one. Bad case of coffee nerves, Tom thought. And maybe a little guilt. Guilt about what he’d left behind. Guilt about what he’d found. Guilt about falling in love in this strange place.
He stepped off the curb and into the path of an oncoming cab. The driver leaned into his horn and swerved left, passing him by inches, UNIDENTIFIED MAN KILLED ON CITY STREET—maybe that was history, too.
After some nervous overtures they adjourned to Stanley’s, where Millstein drank and relaxed.
They talked about music in spite of Joyce’s warning. It turned out Millstein had been an avid jazz fan since he arrived here, “a callow youth from Brooklyn,” at the end of the forties. He was an old Village hand; he’d met Kerouac once or twice—an observation which plunged Tom into one more “time travel” epiphany. Giants had walked here, he thought. “Though of course,” Millstein added, “that scene is long dead.”
Joyce mentioned her friend Susan. Susan had written another letter from the South, where she was getting death threats because of her affiliation with the SNCC. One enterprising recidivist had delivered a neatly wrapped package of horse manure to the door of her motel room.
Millstein shrugged. “Everybody’s too political. It’s tiresome. I’m tired of protest songs, Joyce.”
“And I’m tired of passive pseudo-Zen navel-gazing,” Joyce said. “There’s a world out there.”
“A world run by men in limousines who don’t much listen to music. As far as the world is concerned, guitar playing is a minor-league activity.”
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