11/22/63: A Novel

“I see I can skip the introductory material and get right down to business,” Al said. “That’s good. Sit down, Jake, and I’ll let you in on my only reason for not just taking my whole supply of little pink pills at once.” And when I stayed on my feet: “You know you want to hear this, and what harm? Even if I could make you do something here in 2011-which I can’t-I couldn’t make you do anything back there. Once you get back there, Al Templeton’s a four-year-old kid in Bloomington, Indiana, racing around his backyard in a Lone Ranger mask and still a bit iffy in the old toilet-training department. So sit down. Like they say in the infomercials, you’re under no obligation.”

Right. On the other hand, my mother would have said the devil’s voice is sweet.

But I sat down.

3

“Do you know the phrase watershed moment, buddy?”

I nodded. You didn’t have to be an English teacher to know that one; you didn’t even have to be literate. It was one of those annoying linguistic shortcuts that show up on cable TV news shows, day in and day out. Others include connect the dots and at this point in time. The most annoying of all (I have inveighed against it to my clearly bored students time and time and time again) is the totally meaningless some people say, or many people believe.

“Do you know where it comes from? The origin?”

“Nope.”

“Cartography. A watershed is an area of land, usually mountains or forests, that drains into a river. History is also a river. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“Yes. I suppose I would.” I drank some of my tea.

“Sometimes the events that change history are widespread-like heavy, prolonged rains over an entire watershed that can send a river out of its banks. But rivers can flood even on sunny days. All it takes is a heavy, prolonged downpour in one small area of the watershed. There are flash floods in history, too. Want some examples? How about 9/11? Or what about Bush beating Gore in 2000?”

“You can’t compare a national election to a flash flood, Al.”

“Maybe not most of them, but the 2000 presidential election was in a class by itself. Suppose you could go back to Florida in the fall of Double-O and spend two hundred thousand dollars or so on Al Gore’s behalf?”

“Couple of problems with that,” I said. “First, I don’t have two hundred thousand dollars. Second, I’m a schoolteacher. I can tell you all about Thomas Wolfe’s mother fixation, but when it comes to politics I’m a babe in the woods.”

He gave an impatient flap of his hand, which almost sent his Marine Corps ring flying off his reduced finger. “Money’s not a problem. You’ll just have to trust me on that for now. And advance knowledge usually trumps the shit out of experience. The difference in Florida was supposedly less than six hundred votes. Do you think you could buy six hundred votes on Election Day with two hundred grand, if buying was what it came down to?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably. I guess I’d isolate some communities where there’s a lot of apathy and the voting turnout’s traditionally light-it wouldn’t take all that much research-then go in with the old cashola.”

Al grinned, revealing his missing teeth and unhealthy gums. “Why not? It worked in Chicago for years.”

The idea of buying the presidency for less than the cost of two Mercedes-Benz sedans silenced me.

“But when it comes to the river of history, the watershed moments most susceptible to change are assassinations-the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria gets shot by a mentally unstable pipsqueak named Gavrilo Princip and there’s your kickoff to World War I. On the other hand, after Claus von Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler in 1944-close, but no cigar-the war continued and millions more died.”

I had seen that movie, too.

Al said, “There’s nothing we can do about Archduke Ferdinand or Adolf Hitler. They’re out of our reach.”

I thought of accusing him of making pronounal assumptions and kept my mouth shut. I felt a little like a man reading a very grim book. A Thomas Hardy novel, say. You know how it’s going to end, but instead of spoiling things, that somehow increases your fascination. It’s like watching a kid run his electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the curves.

“As for 9/11, if you wanted to fix that one, you’d have to wait around for forty-three years. You’d be pushing eighty, if you made it at all.”

Now the lone-star flag the gnome had been holding made sense. It was a souvenir of Al’s last jaunt into the past. “You couldn’t even make it to ’63, could you?”

To this he didn’t reply, just watched me. His eyes, which had looked rheumy and vague when he let me into the diner that afternoon, now looked bright. Almost young.

“Because that’s what you’re talking about, right? Dallas in 1963?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I had to opt out. But you’re not sick, buddy. You’re healthy and in the prime of life. You can go back, and you can stop it.”

He leaned forward, his eyes not just bright; they were blazing.