11/22/63

“Three were small ones, but Hokkaido’s gone, too. Dropped into the goddam ocean four years ago like it was on an elevator. The scientists say it’s got something to do with the earth’s crust.” Matter-of-factly he added: “They say if it don’t stop, it’ll tear the planet apart by 2080 or so. Then the solar system’ll have two asteroid belts.”

I drank the rest of my whisky in a single gulp, and the crocodile tears of booze momentarily doubled my vision. When the room solidified again, I pointed to a picture of Harry at about fifty. He was still in his wheelchair, but he looked hale and healthy, at least from the waist up; the legs of his suit pants billowed over his diminished legs. Next to him was a woman in a pink dress that reminded me of Jackie Kennedy’s suit on 11/22/63. I remember my mother telling me never to call a woman who wasn’t beautiful “plain-faced”; they were, she said, “good-faced.” This woman was good-faced.

“Your wife?”

“Ayuh. That was taken on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She died two years later. There’s a lot of that going around. The politicians will tell you the A-bombs did it — been twenty-eight or-nine swapped since Hanoi Hell in ’69. They’ll swear it until they’re blue in the face, but everyone knows the sores and the cancer didn’t start getting really bad up this way until Vermont Yankee went China Syndrome. That happened after years of protests about the place. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘there won’t be any big earthquakes in Vermont, not way up here in God’s Kingdom, just the usual little shakers and poppers.’ Yeah. Look what happened.”

“You’re saying a reactor blew up in Vermont.”

“Spewed radiation all over New England and southern Quebec.”

“When?”

“Jake, are you pulling my leg?”

“Absolutely not.”

“June nineteenth, 1999.”

“I’m sorry about your wife.”

“Thank you, son. She was a good woman. Lovely woman. She didn’t deserve what she got.” He wiped his arm slowly across his eyes. “Been a long time since I talked about her, but then, it’s been a long time since I’ve had anyone to talk with. Can I pour you a little more of this joy-juice?”

I held my fingers a smidge apart. I didn’t expect to be here long; I had to take in all this bogus history, this darkness, in a hurry. I had a lot to do, not least of all bringing my own lovely woman back to life. That would mean another chat with the Green Card Man. I didn’t want to be loaded when I had it, but one more little one wouldn’t hurt. I needed it. My emotions felt frozen, which was probably good, because my mind was reeling.

“Were you paralyzed during the Tet Offensive?” Thinking, Of course you were, but it could have been worse; on the last go-round you died.

He looked blank for a moment, then his face cleared. “I guess it was Tet, come to think of it. We just called it the Great Saigon Fuck-All of 1967. The helicopter I was in crashed. I was lucky. Most of the people on that bird died. Some of em were diplomats, and some of them were just kids.”

“Tet of ’67,” I said. “Not ’68.”

“That’s right. You wouldn’t have been born, but surely you read about it in the history books.”

“No.” I let him pour a little more scotch into my glass — just enough to cover the bottom — and said, “I know that President Kennedy was almost assassinated in November of 1963. After that I know nothing.”

He shook his head. “That’s the funniest case of amnesia I ever heard of.”

“Was Kennedy reelected?”

“Against Goldwater? You bet your ass he was.”

“Did he keep Johnson as his running mate?”

“Sure. Kennedy needed Texas. Got it, too. Governor Connally worked like a slave for him in that election, much as he despised Kennedy’s New Frontier. They called it the Embarrassment Endorsement. Because of what almost happened that day in Dallas. You sure you don’t know this? Never learned any of it in school?”

“You lived it, Harry. So tell me.”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “Drag up a rock, son. Quit lookin at those pictures. If you don’t know Kennedy got reelected in ’64, you’re sure not apt to know any of my family.”

Ah, Harry, I thought.

3

When I was just a little kid — four, maybe even three — a drunk uncle told me the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Not the one in the standard fairy-tale books, but the R-rated version, full of screams, blood, and the dull thump of the woodsman’s axe. My memory of hearing it is vivid to this day, but only a few of the details remain: the wolf’s teeth bared in a shining grin, for instance, and the gore-soaked granny being reborn from the wolf’s yawning belly. This is my way of saying that if you’re expecting The Concise Alternate History of the World as told by Harry Dunning to Jake Epping, forget about it. It wasn’t just the horror of discovering how badly things had gone wrong. It was my need to get back and put things right.