11/22/63: A Novel

I didn’t reply. I was thinking of Rags, the puppy we’d had when I was nine, and still living in Wisconsin. I was allowed to play with him in the backyard on school mornings until the bus came. I was teaching him to sit, fetch, roll over, stuff like that, and he was learning-smart puppy! I loved him a lot.

When the bus came, I was supposed to close the backyard gate before I ran to get on board. Rags always lay down on the kitchen stoop. My mother would call him in and feed him breakfast after she got back from taking my dad to the local train station. I always remembered to close the gate-or at least, I don’t remember ever forgetting to do it-but one day when I came home from school, my mother told me Rags was dead. He’d been in the street and a delivery truck had run him down. She never reproached me with her mouth, not once, but she reproached me with her eyes. Because she had loved Rags, too.

“I closed him in like always,” I said through my tears, and-as I say-I believe that I did. Maybe because I always had. That evening my dad and I buried him in the backyard. Probably not legal, Dad said, but I won’t tell if you won’t.

I lay awake for a long, long time that night, haunted by what I couldn’t remember and terrified of what I might have done. Not to mention guilty. That guilt lingered a long time, a year or more. If I could have remembered for sure, one way or the other, I’m positive it would have left me more quickly. But I couldn’t. Had I shut the gate, or hadn’t I? Again and again I cast my mind to my puppy’s final morning and could remember nothing clearly except heaving his rawhide strip and yelling, “Fetch, Rags, fetch!”

It was like that on my taxi ride to The Falls. First I tried to tell myself that there always had been an earthquake in late November of 1963. It was just one of those factoids-like the attempted assassination of Edwin Walker-that I had missed. As I’d told Al Templeton I majored in English, not history.

It wouldn’t wash. If an earthquake like that had happened in the America I’d lived in before going down the rabbit-hole, I would have known. There were far bigger disasters-the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 killed over two hundred thousand-but seven thousand was a big number for America, more than twice as many fatalities as had occurred on 9/11.

Next I asked myself how what I’d done in Dallas could possibly have caused what this sturdy woman claimed had happened in LA. The only answer I could come up with was the butterfly effect, but how could it kick into gear so soon? No way. Absolutely not. There was no conceivable chain of cause and effect between the two events.

And still a deep part of my mind whispered, You did this. You caused Rags’s death by either leaving the backyard gate open or not closing it firmly enough to latch… and you caused this. You and Al spouted a lot of noble talk about saving thousands of lives in Vietnam, but this is your first real contribution to the New History: seven thousand dead in LA.

It simply couldn’t be. Even if it was…

There’s no downside, Al had said. If things turn to shit, you just take it all back. Easy as erasing a dirty word off a chalkb-

“Mister?” my driver said. “We’re here.” She turned to look at me curiously. “We’ve been here for almost three minutes. Little early for shopping, though. Are you sure this is where you want to be?”

I only knew this was where I had to be. I paid what was on the meter, added a generous tip (it was the FBI’s money, after all), wished her a nice day, and got out.

4

Lisbon Falls was as stinky as ever, but at least the power was on; the blinker at the intersection was flashing as it swung in the northwest wind. The Kennebec Fruit was dark, the front window still empty of the apples, oranges, and bananas that would be displayed there later on. The sign hanging in the door of the greenfront read WILL OPEN AT 10 A.M. A few cars moved on Main Street and a few pedestrians scuttled along with their collars turned up. Across the street, however, the Worumbo mill was fully operational. I could hear the shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH of the weaving flats even from where I was standing. Then I heard something else: someone was calling me, although not by either of my names.

“Jimla! Hey, Jimla!”

I turned toward the mill, thinking: He’s back. The Yellow Card Man is back from the dead, just like President Kennedy.

Only it wasn’t the Yellow Card Man any more than the taxi driver who’d picked me up at the bus station was the same one who’d taken me from Lisbon Falls to the Tamarack Motor Court in 1958. Except the two drivers were almost the same, because the past harmonizes, and the man across the street was similar to the one who’d asked me for a buck because it was double-money day at the greenfront. He was a lot younger than the Yellow Card Man, and his black overcoat was newer and cleaner… but it was almost the same coat.