Stephen King: 11/22/63: A Novel

I tried to remember how long Al’s Diner had stood in the mill courtyard and couldn’t. “Probably even more than that.”

“And what did he tell you? Each trip was the first time?”

“Yes. A complete reset.”

He laughed wearily. “Sure he did. People believe what they see. And still, he should have known better. You should have known better. Each trip creates its own string, and when you have enough strings, they always get snarled. Did it ever cross your friend’s mind to wonder how he could buy the same meat over and over? Or why things he brought from 1958 never disappeared when he made the next trip?”

“I asked him about that. He didn’t know, so he dismissed it.”

He started to smile, but it turned into a wince. The green once more started to fade out of the card stuck in his hat. He dragged deep on his sweet-smelling cigarette. The color returned and steadied. “Yeah, ignoring the obvious. It’s what we all do. Even after his sanity began to totter, Kyle undoubtedly knew that his trips to yonder liquor store were making his condition worse, but he went on, regardless. I don’t blame him; I’m sure the wine eased his pain. Especially toward the end. Things might have been better if he hadn’t been able to get to the liquor store-if it was outside the circle-but it wasn’t. And really, who can say? There is no blaming here, Jake. No condemnation.”

That was good to hear, but only because it meant we could converse about this lunatic subject like halfway rational men. Not that his feelings mattered much to me, either way; I still had to do what I had to do. “What’s your name?”

“Zack Lang. From Seattle, originally.”

“Seattle when?”

“It’s a question with no relevance to the current discussion.”

“It hurts you to be here, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. My own sanity won’t last much longer, if I don’t get back. And the residual effects will be with me forever. High suicide rate among our kind, Jake. Very high. Men-and we are men, not aliens or supernatural beings, if that’s what you were thinking-aren’t made to hold multiple reality-strings in their heads. It’s not like using your imagination. It’s not like that at all. We have training, of course, but you can still feel it eating into you. Like acid.”

“So every trip isn’t a complete reset.”

“Yes and no. It leaves residue. Every time your cook friend-”

“His name was Al.”

“Yes, I suppose I knew that, but my memory has started to break down. It’s like Alzheimer’s, only it’s not Alzheimer’s. It’s because the brain can’t help trying to reconcile all those thin overlays of reality. The strings create multiple images of the future. Some are clear, most are hazy. That’s probably why Kyle thought your name was Jimla. He must have heard it along one of the strings.”

He didn’t hear it, I thought. He saw it on some kind of String-O-Vision. On a billboard in Texas. Maybe even through my eyes.

“You don’t know how lucky you are, Jake. For you, time-travel is simple.”

Not all that simple, I thought.

“There were paradoxes,” I said. “All kinds of them. Weren’t there?”

“No, that’s the wrong word. It’s residue. Didn’t I just tell you that?” He honestly didn’t seem sure. “It gums up the machine. Eventually a point will come where the machine simply… stops.”

I thought of how the engine had blown in the Studebaker Sadie and I had stolen.

“Buying meat over and over again in 1958 wasn’t so bad,” Zack Lang said. “Oh, it was causing trouble down the line, but it was bearable. Then the big changes started. Saving Kennedy was the biggest of all.”

I tried to speak and couldn’t.

“Are you beginning to understand?”

Not entirely, but I could see the general outline, and it scared the living hell out of me. The future was on strings. Like a puppet. Good God.

“The earthquake… I did cause it. When I saved Kennedy, I.. . what? Ripped the time-space continuum?” That should have come out sounding stupid, but it didn’t. It sounded very grave. My head began to throb.

“You need to go back now, Jake.” He spoke gently. “You need to go back and see exactly what you’ve done. What all your hard and no doubt well-meaning work has accomplished.”

I said nothing. I had been worried about going back, but now I was afraid, as well. Is there any phrase more ominous than you need to see exactly what you’ve done? I couldn’t think of one offhand.

“Go. Have a look. Spend a little time. But only a little. If this isn’t put right soon, there’s going to be a catastrophe.”

“How big?”

He spoke calmly. “It could destroy everything.”

“The world? The solar system?” I had to put my hand on the side of the drying shed to hold myself up. “The galaxy? The universe?”

“Bigger than that.” He paused, wanting to make sure I understood. The card in his hatband swirled, turned yellow, swirled back toward green. “Reality itself.”

I walked to the chain. The sign reading NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED squeaked in the wind. I looked back at Zack Lang, that traveler from who knew when. He looked at me without expression, the hem of his black overcoat flapping around his shins.

“Lang! The harmonies… I caused them all. Didn’t I?”

He might have nodded. I’m not sure.

The past fought change because it was destructive to the future. Change created-

I thought of an old ad for Memorex audiotape. It showed a crystal glass being shattered by sound vibrations. By pure harmonics.

“And with every change I succeeded in making, those harmonies increased. That’s the real danger, isn’t it? Those fucking harmonies.”

No answer. Perhaps he had known and forgotten; perhaps he had never known at all.

Easy, I told myself… as I had five years before, when the first strands of gray had yet to show up in my hair. Just take it easy.

I ducked under the chain, my left knee yipping, then stood for a second with the high green side of the drying shed on my left. This time there was no chunk of concrete to mark the spot where the invisible stairs began. How far away from the chain had they been? I couldn’t remember.

I walked slowly, slowly, my shoes gritting on the cracked concrete. Shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH, said the weaving flats… and then, as I took my sixth step, and the seventh, the sound changed to too-FAR, too-FAR. I took another step. Then another. Soon I’d reach the end of the drying shed and be in the courtyard beyond. It was gone. The bubble had burst.

I took one more step, and although there was no stair riser, for just a moment I saw my shoe as a double exposure. It was on the concrete, but it was also on dirty green linoleum. I took another step, and I was a double exposure. Most of my body was standing beside the Worumbo mill drying shed in late November of 1963, but part of me was somewhere else, and it wasn’t the pantry of Al’s Diner.

What if I came out not in Maine, not even on earth, but in some strange other dimension? Some place with a crazy red sky and air that would poison my lungs and stop my heart?

I looked back again. Lang stood there with his coat whipping in the wind. There was still no expression on his face. You’re on your own, that empty face seemed to say. I can’t make you do anything.

It was true, but unless I went through the rabbit-hole into the Land of Ahead, I wouldn’t be able to come back to the Land of Ago. And Sadie would stay dead forever.

I closed my eyes and managed one more step. Suddenly I could smell faint ammonia and some other, more unpleasant, odor. After you’d crossed the country at the rear of a lot of Greyhound buses, that second smell was unmistakable. It was the unlovely aroma of a toilet cubicle that needed a lot more than a Glade air-freshener on the wall to sweeten it up.