Jack Finney - Time and Again

He nodded. "If there are letters, he'll read them. If anything's hidden, he'll find it."

"All right, goddammit! Go ahead! He sure as hell won't find anything interesting!"

"I know." Rube was laughing at me. "Because he won't even look. There's no man I'm going to phone. Nobody's going to search your crummy apartment. Or ever was."

"Then what the hell is this all about!"

"Don't you know?" He stood looking at me for a moment; then he grinned. "You don't know it and you won't believe it; but it means you've already decided."

Saturday morning Katie and I drove up into Connecticut for the day. The clear sunny weather still held, as long a fall as I could remember. It was weather that couldn't last, we didn't want to waste it, and we drove up in Katie's MG. It was the old-style model with running boards and exposed radiator-front, and although New York is really no place to own a car, Kate had this because it just exactly fitted into a narrow area way beside her shop if she illegally drove up over the curb. When it was parked you had to climb in and out over the back end, but it saved garage rent, making it possible for Kate to have it.

Katie had a tiny antique shop on Third Avenue in the Forties. Her foster parents — she'd been adopted when she was two — had died two years ago within six months of each other; they were elderly, older than her own parents would have been. She'd moved to New York then, from Westchester, worked as a stenographer, didn't like it, and opened the shop a year later with the few thousand dollars she'd inherited. It was failing. She'd added greeting cards and a little rental library which hadn't helped, and we both knew she'd have to give up the shop when the lease expired in the spring.

I was sorry, both for Kate and because I liked the place. I liked poking around it, discovering something I hadn't seen before: a box of old political-campaign buttons under a counter, maybe, or something new she'd just bought such as an admiral's hat I could try on. And whenever there's been time or when I've had to wait for Kate as I did this morning, I'd usually sit down with one of the stereoscopes — the viewers — she had, and one of several big boxes loaded with old stereoscopic views, mostly of New York City. Because I've always felt a wonder at old photographs not easy to explain. Maybe I don't need to explain; maybe you'll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you're seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can — what was just inside the door.

The wonder is even stronger with old stereoscopic views — the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth. It's never been a mystery to me why the whole country was once crazy about them. Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real: Insert a view, slide it into focus, and the old scene leaps out at you, astonishingly three-dimensional. And then, for me, the awe becomes intense. Because now you really see the arrested moment, so actual it seems that if you watch intently, the life caught here must continue. That the raised horse's hoof so startlingly distinct in the foreground must move down to the solidness of pavement below it again; those carriage wheels revolve, the girl walk closer, the man move on out of the scene. The feeling that the tantalizing reality of the vanished moment might somehow be seized — that if you watch long enough you might detect that first nearly imperceptible movement — is the answer to the question Kate has asked me more than once: "How can you sit there so long — you hardly move! — staring endlessly at the very same picture?" So I liked the shop; it had things like stereoscopic views to stare at. And I liked it because I'd met Katie through it; it's the only time in my life I ever worked up the nerve to do what I did.

I'd needed a certain kind of antique table lamp to sketch into an ad I was working on, and I came to Katie's shop and stopped to look into the window just as she was taking something out of it. I looked at her; she's a nice-looking girl with that kind of thick dark-brown coppery hair that just misses being red, and the lightly freckled skin and the brown eyes that so often go with it. But it was her face that hooked me; I mean the look of it, the expression. It's the face, you know at first sight, of an extremely nice person, that's all. I liked her instantly, the person as much as the nice-looking girl. And I'm sure that's why, when she glanced up at me, I had the nerve — before I could remember that I didn't have the nerve — to touch my lips with my bunched fingers and toss her a kiss through the glass, at the same time crossing my eyes. She smiled, and before I could lose this new untypical courage I walked right on into the shop, trusting that I'd think of something to say, which I did. I said I was looking for another Napoleon hat, that they'd taken my old one away. She smiled again, which shows how kind she was, and we talked. And while she couldn't come out for a cup of coffee with me then, I was back next day, and we went out to dinner.

Katie came down now — her apartment is over the shop — in a short brown-canvas car coat, a yellow scarf over her hair, which was a great combination, and she gave me the car keys, asking if I'd mind driving; she knew I liked to drive the MG.

We had a good time, a nice day, and in the late afternoon I was driving along a little country road I'd found — a dirt road, farmland on each side, occasional stone fences, and a lot of trees, some still with fall foliage. I was going no more than twenty, just lazing along, one hand on the wheel, not thinking of anything much. Off and on during the day I'd thought of Rube Prien, wishing I could talk to Katie about it; I couldn't quite remember whether or not I'd promised I wouldn't mention even the conversation with Prien, so I didn't say anything.

It was still fairly warm, lots of late-afternoon sun, and Katie untied her scarf, pulled it off, then tossed her head to shake out that thick handsome hair, very coppery now in the slanted sunlight, then fluffing it up at the back with one hand — a great combination of feminine gestures — and I glanced at her and smiled. She smiled back, sitting there smoothing her scarf flat on her lap; she was wearing a green tweed skirt. Then she looked at me and slid closer, which was pleasant and flattering. She was holding the scarf by the front two corners now, stretching it out tight between her hands. She lifted it to just above windshield level and the air took it, fluttering it tautly back from the corners she held. She moved it directly over my head, and then very quickly — a scurry of motion — she drew the two corners down past my face to below my chin and let go the scarf. The wind instantly plastered it tight to my face like a pale-yellow skin, and I was absolutely blind. I couldn't even breathe very well, or thought I couldn't, and I let out a strangled yelp and was in a panic for a second or so, unable to think.

Just try it some time: driving along a road with a damn scarf plastered over your eyes. You don't know what to do; whether to hang onto the wheel trying to steer from memory, braking as fast as you can without skidding off the road; or whether to let go and try to snatch off the scarf before piling up.