“Something doesn’t want it to be changed, I’m pretty sure of that. But it can be. If you take the resistance into account, it can be.” Al was looking at me, eyes bright in his haggard face. “All in all, the story of Carolyn Poulin ends with ‘And she lived happily ever after,’ wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes.”
“Look inside the back cover of the notebook I gave you, buddy, and you might change your mind. Little something I printed out today.”
I did as he asked and found a cardboard pocket. For storing things like office memos and business cards, I assumed. A single sheet of paper was folded into it. I took it out, opened it up, and looked for a long time. It was a computer printout of page 1 of the Weekly Lisbon Enterprise. The date below the masthead was June 18, 1965. The headline read: LHS CLASS OF ’65 GOES FORTH IN TEARS, LAUGHTER. In the photograph, a bald man (his mortarboard tucked under his arm so it wouldn’t tumble off his head) was bending over a smiling girl in a wheelchair. He was holding one side of her diploma; she was holding the other. Carolyn Poulin reaches a major goal on her long road to recovery, the caption read.
I looked up at Al, confused. “If you changed the future and saved her, how can you have this?”
“Every trip’s a reset, buddy. Remember?”
“Oh my God. When you went back to stop Oswald, everything you did to save Poulin got erased.”
“Yes… and no.”
“What do you mean, yes and no?”
“The trip back to save Kennedy was going to be the last trip, but I was in no hurry to get down to Texas. Why would I be? In September of 1958, Ozzie Rabbit—that’s what his fellow Marines called him—isn’t even in America. He’s steaming gaily around the South Pacific with his unit, keeping Japan and Formosa safe for democracy. So I went back to the Shadyside Cabins in Sebago and hung out there until November fifteenth. Again. But when it rolled around, I left even earlier in the morning, which was a good fucking call on my part, because I didn’t just have a couple of flat tires that time. My goddam rental Chevy threw a rod. Ended up paying the service station guy in Naples sixty bucks to use his car for the day, and left him my Marine Corps ring as extra security. Had some other adventures, which I won’t bother recapping—”
“Was the bridge still out in Durham?”
“Don’t know, buddy, I didn’t even try going that way. A person who doesn’t learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation. One thing I learned was which way Andrew Cullum would be coming, and I wasted no time getting there. The tree was down across the road, just like before, and when he came along, I was wrestling with it, just like before. Pretty soon I’m having chest pains, just like before. We played out the whole comedy, Carolyn Poulin had her Saturday in the woods with her dad, and a couple of weeks later I said yahoo and got on a train for Texas.”
“Then how can I still have this picture of her graduating in a wheelchair?”
“Because every trip down the rabbit-hole’s a reset.” Then Al just looked at me, to see if I got it. After a minute, I did.
“I—?”
“That’s right, buddy. You bought yourself a dime root beer this afternoon. You also put Carolyn Poulin back in a wheelchair.”
CHAPTER 4
1
Al let me help him into his bedroom, and even muttered “Thanks, buddy” when I knelt to unlace his shoes and pull them off. He only balked when I offered to help him into the bathroom.
“Making the world a better place is important, but so is being able to get to the john under your own power.”
“Just as long as you’re sure you can make it.”
“I’m sure I can tonight, and I’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. Go home, Jake. Start reading the notebook—there’s a lot there. Sleep on it. Come see me in the morning and tell me what you decided. I’ll still be here.”
“Ninety-five percent probability?”
“At least ninety-seven. On the whole, I’m feeling pretty chipper. I wasn’t sure I’d even get this far with you. Just telling it—and having you believe it—is a load off my mind.”
I wasn’t sure I did believe it, even after my adventure that afternoon, but I didn’t say so. I told him goodnight, reminded him not to lose count of his pills (“Yeah, yeah”), and left. I stood outside looking at the gnome with his Lone Star flag for a minute before going down the walk to my car.
Don’t mess with Texas, I thought… but maybe I was going to. And given Al’s difficulties with changing the past—the blown tires, the blown engine, the collapsed bridge—I had an idea that if I went ahead, Texas was going to mess with me.
2
After all that, I didn’t think I’d be able to get to sleep before two or three in the morning, and there was a fair likelihood that I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep at all. But sometimes the body asserts its own imperatives. By the time I got home and fixed myself a weak drink (being able to have liquor in the house again was one of several small pluses in my return to the single state), I was heavy-eyed; by the time I had finished the scotch and read the first nine or ten pages of Al’s Oswald Book, I could barely keep them open.
I rinsed my glass in the sink, went into the bedroom (leaving a trail of clothes behind me as I walked, a thing Christy would have given me hell about), and fell onto the double bed where I now slept single. I thought about reaching over to turn off the bedside lamp, but my arm felt heavy, heavy. Correcting honors essays in the strangely quiet teachers’ room now seemed like something that had happened a very long time ago. Nor was that strange; everyone knows that, for such an unforgiving thing, time is uniquely malleable.
I crippled that girl. Put her back in a wheelchair.
When you went down those steps from the pantry this afternoon, you didn’t even know who Carolyn Poulin was, so don’t be an ass. Besides, maybe somewhere she’s still walking. Maybe going through that hole creates alternate realities, or time-streams, or some damn thing.
Carolyn Poulin, sitting in her wheelchair and getting her diploma. Back in the year when “Hang On Sloopy” by the McCoys was top of the pops.
Carolyn Poulin, walking through her garden of daylilies in 1979, when “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People was top of the pops; occasionally dropping to one knee to pull some weeds, then springing up again and walking on.
Carolyn Poulin in the woods with her dad, soon to be crippled.
Carolyn Poulin in the woods with her dad, soon to walk into an ordinary smalltown adolescence. Where had she been on that time-stream, I wondered, when the radio and TV bulletins announced that the thirty-fifth President of the United States had been shot in Dallas?
John Kennedy can live. You can save him, Jake.
And would that really make things better? There were no guarantees.
I felt like a man trying to fight his way out of a nylon stocking.
I closed my eyes and saw pages flying off a calendar—the kind of corny transition they used in old movies. I saw them flying out my bedroom window like birds.
One more thought came before I dropped off: the dopey sophomore with the even dopier straggle of goatee on his chin, grinning and muttering, Hoptoad Harry, hoppin down the av-a-new. And Harry stopping me when I went to call the kid on it. Nah, don’t bother, he’d said. I’m used to it.