11/22/63

I know the basics of suspense fiction — I ought to, I’ve read enough thrillers in my lifetime — and the prime rule is to keep the reader guessing. But if you’ve gotten any feel for my character at all, based on that day’s extraordinary events, you’ll know that I wanted to be convinced. Christy Epping had become Christy Thompson (boy meets girl on the AA campus, remember?), and I was a man on his own. We didn’t even have any kids to fight over. I had a job I was good at, but if I told you it was challenging, it would be a lie. Hitchhiking around Canada with a buddy after my senior year of college was the closest thing to an adventure I’d ever had, and given the cheerful, helpful nature of most Canadians, it wasn’t much of an adventure. Now, all of a sudden, I’d been offered a chance to become a major player not just in American history but in the history of the world. So yes, yes, yes, I wanted to be convinced.

But I was also afraid.

“What if it went wrong?” I drank down the rest of my iced tea in four long swallows, the ice cubes clicking against my teeth. “What if I managed, God knows how, to stop it from happening and made things worse instead of better? What if I came back and discovered America had become a fascist regime? Or that the pollution had gotten so bad everybody was walking around in gas masks?”

“Then you’d go back again,” he said. “Back to two minutes of twelve on September ninth of 1958. Cancel the whole thing out. Every trip is the first trip, remember?”

“Sounds good, but what if the changes were so radical your little diner wasn’t even there anymore?”

He grinned. “Then you’d have to live your life in the past. But would that be so bad? As an English teacher, you’d still have a marketable skill, and you wouldn’t even need it. I was there for four years, Jake, and I made a small fortune. Do you know how?”

I could have taken an educated guess, but I shook my head.

“Betting. I was careful — I didn’t want to raise any suspicions, and I sure didn’t want some bookie’s leg-breakers coming after me — but when you’ve studied up on who won every big sporting event between the summer of 1958 and the fall of 1963, you can afford to be careful. I won’t say you can live like a king, because that’s living dangerously. But there’s no reason you can’t live well. And I think the diner’ll still be there. It has been for me, and I changed plenty of things. Anybody does. Just walking around the block to buy a loaf of bread and a quart of milk changes the future. Ever hear of the butterfly effect? It’s a fancy-shmancy scientific theory that basically boils down to the idea that—”

He started coughing again, the first protracted fit since he’d let me in. He grabbed one of the maxis from the box, plastered it across his mouth like a gag, and then doubled over. Gruesome retching sounds came up from his chest. It sounded as if half his works had come loose and were slamming around in there like bumper cars at an amusement park. Finally it abated. He glanced at the pad, winced, folded it up, and threw it away.

“Sorry, buddy. This oral menstruation’s a bitch.”

“Jesus, Al!”

He shrugged. “If you can’t joke about it, what’s the point of anything? Now where was I?”

“Butterfly effect.”

“Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later — or four hundred — there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?”

It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. “Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?”

He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

That was a good question, so I just told him to go on.

“You changed the past this afternoon in all sorts of little ways, just by walking into the Kennebec Fruit… but the stairs leading up into the pantry and back into 2011 were still there, weren’t they? And The Falls is the same as when you left it.”

“So it seems, yes. But you’re talking about something a little more major. To wit, saving JFK’s life.”

“Oh, I’m talking about a lot more than that, because this ain’t some butterfly in China, buddy. I’m also talking about saving RFK’s life, because if John lives in Dallas, Robert probably doesn’t run for president in 1968. The country wouldn’t have been ready to replace one Kennedy with another.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“No, but listen. Do you think that if you save John Kennedy’s life, his brother Robert is still at the Ambassador Hotel at twelve-fifteen in the morning on June fifth, 1968? And even if he is, is Sirhan Sirhan still working in the kitchen?”

Maybe, but the chances had to be awfully small. If you introduced a million variables into an equation, of course the answer was going to change.