11/22/63: A Novel

What have I done here, you ask, now that I have laid my good-angel wings aside? I have written. I have a fountain pen-one given to me by Mike and Bobbi Jill, you remember them-and I walked up the road to a market, where I bought ten refills. The ink is black, which suits my mood. I also bought two dozen thick legal pads, and I have filled all but the last one. Near the market is a Western Auto store, where I bought a spade and a steel footlocker, the kind with a combination. The total cost of my purchases was seventeen dollars and nineteen cents. Are these items enough to turn the world dark and filthy? What will happen to the clerk, whose ordained course has been changed-just by our brief transaction-from what it would have been otherwise?

I don’t know, but I do know this: I once gave a high school football player the chance to shine as an actor, and his girlfriend was disfigured. You could say I wasn’t responsible, but we know better, don’t we? The butterfly spreads its wings.

For three weeks I wrote all day, every day. Twelve hours on some days. Fourteen on others. The pen racing and racing. My hand got sore. I soaked it, then wrote some more. Some nights I went to the Lisbon Drive-In, where there’s a special price for walk-ins: thirty cents. I sat in one of the folding chairs in front of the snackbar and next to the kiddie playground. I watched The Long, Hot Summer again. I watched The Bridge on the River Kwai and South Pacific. I watched a HORRORIFFIC DOUBLE FEATURE consisting of The Fly and The Blob. And I wondered what I was changing. If I so much as slapped a bug, I wondered what I was changing ten years up the line. Or twenty. Or forty.

I don’t know, I don’t know.

Here’s another thing I do know. The past is obdurate for the same reason a turtle’s shell is obdurate: because the living flesh inside is tender and defenseless.

And something else. The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you create a pleasing sound. A harmonic. But then start adding strings. Ten strings, a hundred strings, a thousand, a million. Because they multiply! Harry didn’t know what that watery ripping sound was, but I’m pretty sure I do; that’s the sound of too much harmony created by too many strings.

Sing high C in a voice that’s loud enough and true enough and you can shatter fine crystal. Play the right harmonic notes through your stereo loud enough and you can shatter window glass. It follows (to me, at least) that if you put enough strings on time’s instrument, you can shatter reality.

But the reset is almost complete each time. Sure, it leaves a residue. The Ocher Card Man said so, and I believe him. But if I don’t make any big changes… if I do nothing but go to Jodie and meet Sadie again for the first time… if we should happen to fall in love…

I want that to happen, and think it probably would. Blood calls to blood, heart calls to heart. She’ll want children. So, for that matter, will I. I tell myself one child more or less won’t make any difference, either. Or not much difference. Or two. Even three. (It is, after all The Era of Big Families.) We’ll live quietly. We won’t make waves.

Only each child is a wave.

Every breath we take is a wave.

You have to go back one last time, the Ocher Card Man said. You have to close the circle. Want has nothing to do with it.

Can I really be thinking of risking the world-perhaps reality itself-for the woman I love? That makes Lee’s insanity look piddling.

The man with the card tucked into the brim of his hat is waiting for me beside the drying shed. I can feel him there. Maybe he’s not sending out thought-waves, but it sure feels like it. Come back. You don’t have to be the Jimla. It’s not too late to be Jake again. To be the good guy, the good angel. Never mind saving the president; save the world. Do it while there’s still time.

Yes.

I will.

Probably I will.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be soon enough, won’t it?

10/1/58

Still here at the Tamarack. Still writing.

My uncertainty about Clayton is the worst. Clayton is what I thought about as I screwed the last of my refills into my trusty fountain pen, and he’s what I’m thinking about now. If I knew she was going to be safe from him, I think I could let go. Will John Clayton still turn up at Sadie’s house on Bee Tree Lane if I subtract myself from the equation? Maybe seeing us together was what finally drove him over the edge. But he followed her to Texas even before he knew about us, and if he does it again, this time he might cut her throat instead of her cheek. Deke and I wouldn’t be there to stop him, certainly.

Only maybe he did know about us. Sadie might have written a friend back in Savannah, and the friend might have told a friend, and the news that Sadie was spending time with a guy-one who didn’t know the imperatives of the broom-might finally have gotten back to her ex. If none of that happened because I wasn’t there, Sadie would be all right.