Stephen King: 11/22/63: A Novel

“What’s your name, sir? You already know mine.”

“Jake Epping. Don’t suppose that rings any bells with you, does it?”

He considered, then shook his head. “Should it?”

“Probably not.”

He stuck out his hand. It shook slightly with some incipient palsy. “I’ll shake with you, just the same. That could have been nasty.”

I shook his hand gladly. Hello, new friend. Hello, old friend.

“Okay, now that we got that took care of, we can drink with clear consciences. I’ll get us that single malt.” He started for the kitchen, rolling his wheels with arms that were a little shaky but still strong. The chair had a small motor, but either it didn’t work or he was saving the battery. He looked back over his shoulder at me. “Not dangerous, are you? I mean, to me?”

“Not to you, Harry.” I smiled. “I’m your good angel.”

“This is fucking peculiar,” he said. “But these days, what isn’t?”

He went into the kitchen. Soon more light glowed. Homey orange-yellow light. In here, everything seemed homey. But out there. .. in the world…

Just what in the hell had I done?

“What’ll we drink to?” I asked when we had our glasses in hand.

“Better times than these. Will that work for you, Mr. Epping?”

“It works fine. And make it Jake.”

We clinked. Drank. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything stronger than Lone Star beer. The whisky was like hot honey.

“No electricity?” I asked, looking around at the lamps. He had turned them all low, presumably to save on oil.

He made a sour face. “Not from around here, are you?”

A question I’d heard before, from Frank Anicetti, at the Fruit. On my very first trip into the past. Then I’d told a lie. I didn’t want to do that now.

“I don’t quite know how to answer that, Harry.”

He shrugged it off. “We’re supposed to get juice three days a week, and this is supposed to be one of the days, but it cut off around six P.M. I believe in Province Electric like I believe in Santa Claus.”

As I considered this, I remembered the stickers on the cars. “How long has Maine been a part of Canada?”

He gave me a how-crazy-are-you look, but I could see he was enjoying this. The strangeness of it and also the there -ness of it. I wondered when he’d last had a real conversation with someone. “Since 2005. Did someone bump you on the head, or something?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” I went to his wheelchair, dropped on the knee that still bent willingly and without pain, and showed him the place on the back of my head where the hair had never grown back. “I took a bad beating a few months ago-”

“Yuh, I seen you limping when you ran at those kids.”

“-and now there’s lots of things I don’t remember.”

The floor suddenly shook beneath us. The flames in the kerosene lamps trembled. The pictures on the walls rattled, and a two-feet-high plaster Jesus with his arms outstretched took a jittery stroll toward the edge of the mantelpiece. He looked like a guy contemplating suicide, and given the current state of things as I had observed them, I couldn’t blame him.

“Popper,” Harry said matter-of-factly when the shaking stopped. “You remember those, right?”

“No.” I got up, went to the mantelpiece, and pushed Jesus back beside his Holy Mother.

“Thanks. I’ve already lost half the damn disciples off the shelf in my bedroom, and I mourn every one. They were my mom’s. Poppers are earth tremors. We get a lot of em, but most of the big-daddy quakes are in the Midwest or out California way. Europe and China too, of course.”

“People tying up their boats in Idaho, are they?” I was still at the mantelpiece, now looking at the framed pictures.

“Hasn’t got that bad yet, but… you know four of the Japanese islands are gone, right?”

I looked at him with dismay. “No.”

“Three were small ones, but Hokkaido’s gone, too. Dropped into the goddam ocean four years ago like it was on an elevator. The scientists say it’s got something to do with the earth’s crust.” Matter-of-factly he added: “They say if it don’t stop, it’ll tear the planet apart by 2080 or so. Then the solar system’ll have two asteroid belts.”

I drank the rest of my whisky in a single gulp, and the crocodile tears of booze momentarily doubled my vision. When the room solidified again, I pointed to a picture of Harry at about fifty. He was still in his wheelchair, but he looked hale and healthy, at least from the waist up; the legs of his suit pants billowed over his diminished legs. Next to him was a woman in a pink dress that reminded me of Jackie Kennedy’s suit on 11/22/63. I remember my mother telling me never to call a woman who wasn’t beautiful “plain-faced”; they were, she said, “good-faced.” This woman was good-faced.

“Your wife?”

“Ayuh. That was taken on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She died two years later. There’s a lot of that going around. The politicians will tell you the A-bombs did it-been twenty-eight or-nine swapped since Hanoi Hell in ’69. They’ll swear it until they’re blue in the face, but everyone knows the sores and the cancer didn’t start getting really bad up this way until Vermont Yankee went China Syndrome. That happened after years of protests about the place. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘there won’t be any big earthquakes in Vermont, not way up here in God’s Kingdom, just the usual little shakers and poppers.’ Yeah. Look what happened.”

“You’re saying a reactor blew up in Vermont.”

“Spewed radiation all over New England and southern Quebec.”

“When?”

“Jake, are you pulling my leg?”

“Absolutely not.”

“June nineteenth, 1999.”

“I’m sorry about your wife.”

“Thank you, son. She was a good woman. Lovely woman. She didn’t deserve what she got.” He wiped his arm slowly across his eyes. “Been a long time since I talked about her, but then, it’s been a long time since I’ve had anyone to talk with. Can I pour you a little more of this joy-juice?”

I held my fingers a smidge apart. I didn’t expect to be here long; I had to take in all this bogus history, this darkness, in a hurry. I had a lot to do, not least of all bringing my own lovely woman back to life. That would mean another chat with the Green Card Man. I didn’t want to be loaded when I had it, but one more little one wouldn’t hurt. I needed it. My emotions felt frozen, which was probably good, because my mind was reeling.

“Were you paralyzed during the Tet Offensive?” Thinking, Of course you were, but it could have been worse; on the last go-round you died.

He looked blank for a moment, then his face cleared. “I guess it was Tet, come to think of it. We just called it the Great Saigon Fuck-All of 1967. The helicopter I was in crashed. I was lucky. Most of the people on that bird died. Some of em were diplomats, and some of them were just kids.”

“Tet of ’67,” I said. “Not ’68.”

“That’s right. You wouldn’t have been born, but surely you read about it in the history books.”

“No.” I let him pour a little more scotch into my glass-just enough to cover the bottom-and said, “I know that President Kennedy was almost assassinated in November of 1963. After that I know nothing.”

He shook his head. “That’s the funniest case of amnesia I ever heard of.”

“Was Kennedy reelected?”

“Against Goldwater? You bet your ass he was.”

“Did he keep Johnson as his running mate?”

“Sure. Kennedy needed Texas. Got it, too. Governor Connally worked like a slave for him in that election, much as he despised Kennedy’s New Frontier. They called it the Embarrassment Endorsement. Because of what almost happened that day in Dallas. You sure you don’t know this? Never learned any of it in school?”