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 American 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.”