11/22/63

The Beatles reunited and played a Peace Concert. A suicide bomber in the crowd detonated his vest and killed three hundred spectators. Paul McCartney was blinded.

The Mideast went up in flames shortly thereafter.

Russia collapsed.

Some group — probably exiled Russian hard-line fanatics — began selling nuclear weapons to terrorist groups, including The Base.

“By 1994,” Harry said in his dry voice, “the oil fields over there were so much black glass. The kind that glows in the dark. Since then, though, the terrorism has kind of burned itself out. Someone blew up a suitcase nuke in Miami two years ago, but it didn’t work very well. I mean, it’ll be sixty or eighty years before anybody can party on South Beach — and of course the Gulf of Mexico is basically dead soup — but only ten thousand people have died of radiation poisoning. By then it wasn’t our problem. Maine voted to become a part of Canada, and President Clinton was happy to say good riddance.”

“Bill Clinton’s president?”

“Gosh, no. He was a shoo-in for the ’04 nomination, but he died of a heart attack at the convention. His wife stepped in. She’s president.”

“Doing a good job?”

Harry waggled his hand. “Not bad… but you can’t legislate earthquakes. And that’s what’s going to do for us, in the end.”

Overhead, that watery ripping sound came again. I looked up. Harry didn’t.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Son,” he said, “nobody seems to know. The scientists argue, but in this case I think the preachers might have the straight of it. They say it’s God getting ready to tear down all the works of His hands, same way that Samson tore down the Temple of the Philistines.” He drank the rest of his whisky. Thin color had bloomed in his cheeks… which were, as far as I could see, free of radiation sores. “And on that one, I think they might be right.”

“Christ almighty,” I said.

He looked at me levelly. “Heard enough history, son?”

Enough to last me a lifetime.

4

“I have to go,” I said. “Will you be all right?”

“Until I’m not. Same as everyone else.” He looked at me closely. “Jake, where did you drop from? And why the hell should I feel like I know you?”

“Maybe because we always know our good angels?”

“Bullshit.”

I wanted to be gone. All in all, I thought my life after the next reset was going to be much simpler. But first, because this was a good man who had suffered greatly in all three of his incarnations, I approached the mantelpiece again, and took down one of the framed pictures.

“Be careful with that,” Harry said tetchily. “It’s my family.”

“I know.” I put it in his gnarled and age-spotted hands, a black-and-white photo that had, by the faintly fuzzy look of the image, been blown up from a Kodak snap. “Did your dad take this? I ask, because he’s the only one not in it.”

He looked at me curiously, then back down at the picture. “No,” he said. “This was taken by a neighbor-lady in the summer of 1958. My dad and mom were separated by then.”

I wondered if the neighbor-lady had been the one I’d seen smoking a cigarette as she alternated washing the family car and spraying the family dog. Somehow I was sure it had been. From far down in my mind, like a sound heard coming up from a deep well, came the chanting voices of the jump-rope girls: my old man drives a sub-ma-rine.

“He had a drinking problem. That wasn’t such a big deal back then, lots of men drank too much and stayed under the same roofs with their wives, but he got mean when he drank.”

“I bet he did,” I said.

He looked at me again, more sharply, then smiled. Most of his teeth were gone, but the smile was still pleasant enough. “I doubt if you know what you’re talking about. How old are you, Jake?”

“Forty.” Although I was sure I looked older that night.

“Which means you were born in 1971.”

Actually it had been ’76, but there was no way I could tell him that without discussing the five missing years that had fallen down the rabbit-hole, like Alice into Wonderland. “Close enough,” I said. “That photo was taken at the house on Kossuth Street.” Spoken the Derry way: Cossut.

I tapped Ellen, who was standing to the left of her mother, thinking of the grown-up version I’d spoken to on the phone — call that one Ellen 2.0. Also thinking — it was inevitable — of Ellen Dockerty, the harmonic version I’d known in Jodie.

“Can’t tell from this, but she was a little carrot-top, wasn’t she? A pint-sized Lucille Ball.”

Harry said nothing, only gaped.

“Did she go into comedy? Or something else? Radio or TV?”

“She does a DJ show on Province of Maine CBC,” he said faintly. “But how…”

“Here’s Troy… and Arthur, also known as Tugga… and here’s you, with your mother’s arm around you.” I smiled. “Just the way God planned it.” If only it could stay that way. If only.

“I… you…”

“Your father was murdered, wasn’t he?”