Jack Finney - Time and Again

Set in the building wall at the end of the block was an ordinary wood door with a weathered brass knob and key circle. The gray paint was cracked and peeled to the bare wood in places, and the door looked locked. But stenciled on the wet bricks above it in white paint so faded you could barely make it out was the number Rube had given me. I rapped on the door panel, and there was a silence except for the sky-high roar of the Thursday-morning city and the sound of the rain on the hoods and tops of the parked cars behind me. I had no belief that my knock would be answered, or that there was anyone on the other side to hear it.

But there was. The knob rattled, turned, the door opened, and a black-haired young man in white coveralls looked out; in red stitching over a breast pocket it said Don, and he had a copy of Sports Illustrated in one hand. He said, "Hi; come on in. Boy, what a lousy day," and I walked in past him. As he closed the door I read, BEEKEY BROTHERS, MOVERS, in red block-letters across his back.

We were in a windowless fluorescent-lighted office no more than ten feet square, furnished with a desk, swivel chair, and a couple of yellow-oak straight chairs with most of the varnish worn off. On the wall hung a Beekey Brothers calendar and a lot of framed photographs of smiling crews posed alongside Beekey vans. "Yeah?" said the man in coveralls, sitting down behind his desk. "What can we do for you? Moving? Storage?"

I said I'd come to see Rube Prien, half expecting him to look blank, but he asked my name, then dialed a phone, gesturing with his chin toward a couple of hooks on the wall. "Hang up your hat and coat," he said to me, then into the phone, "Mr. Morley to see Mr. Prien." He listened, said, "Right," and hung up. "Be down in a minute; make yourself at home." He lay back in his swivel chair and began reading his magazine.

I sat there trying to wonder what was going to happen now, but there was nothing for my mind to work on, and I found myself examining the framed photographs: one of them, inscribed "The Gang, " 1921, in white ink, showed a Beekey van, an old Mack truck with metal-spoke wheels and solid rubber tires; half the crew wore big mustaches.

There was a click from a door set flush in the wall at my right. I looked up as it swung open, noticing that there was no knob on this side. Rube stood holding the door open behind him with a foot. He was wearing clean wash pants and a short-sleeved white shirt open at the neck; his forearms were fuzzy with red hair and were as large as my biceps and more muscular. "Well, I see you found us." He put out his hand. "Welcome, Si. Glad to see you."

"Thanks. Yeah, I found it. In spite of the disguise."

"Oh, we're not really disguised." He beckoned me in, then let the door swing closed behind us; it made a quiet heavy thunk, and I realized it was painted metal. We were standing in a little concrete-floored hallway badly lighted by a bare bulb in a wire cage in the ceiling. A pair of green-enameled elevator doors faced us, and Rube reached past me to poke the button. "Actually the building is the way it's been for years. On the outside. Up to ten months ago this was a genuine moving-and-storage business, a family corporation. We bought it, and we still do some moving and a little storage in a walled-off section of the building; enough to maintain the pose." The elevator doors slid open, we stepped in, and Rube pressed 6. The only other visible button said 1; the other buttons were taped over with dirty adhesive.

"The older employees were pensioned off, the others gradually replaced by our people; I was 'hired' and actually worked as a moving man for a month. Damn near killed me." Rube smiled; that nice genuine smile you couldn't help responding to. "Now our estimates tend to be a little high; not much, just a little. And the business generally goes to a competitor. We look busy as ever, though. In fact, we are. We've even added two new vans. One hell of a lot of stuff has been moved out of here in our own closed vans; the entire interior of the building, in fact. And I guess we've brought even more stuff in." The green doors slid open, and we stepped out onto a floor of offices.

You could smell the newness, and it looked like a floor in any modern office building: polished vinyl-tiled corridors under a string of skylights; beige-painted walls with stenciled black arrows indicating groups of office numbers; looped fire hoses behind glass; occasional drinking fountains; numbered flush doors each with a black-and-white plastic name-plate fastened to the wall beside it. Far ahead, as we turned toward her, a girl in a white blouse and dark skirt, her face indistinguishable, walked toward us carrying a stack of papers in one arm; she turned into an office before reaching us. As we passed them I glanced at the plastic nameplates for some sort of clue, but they were only meaningless names: W.W. O'NEIL; V. ZAHLIAN; MISS K. VEACH….

Rube gestured at a door just ahead; the plastic wall sign beside it said PERSONNEL. "We have to get this over first; withholding forms, Blue Cross, insurance, the works. Even we don't escape this stuff." He opened the door, gesturing me in first, and we stepped into a little anteroom half filled by a desk at which a girl sat typing. "Rose, this is Simon Morley, a new hand. Si, Rose Macabee." We said how-do-you-do, and Rube said, "How long will you need, Rose? Half hour?" She said about twenty-five minutes, and Rube said he'd be back for me then, and left.

"In here, please, Mr. Morley." The girl opened the door and led the way into an ordinary office, window-less and bare-looking, lighted by a large skylight. "Will you sit down, please?" I walked to the flat-topped desk and sat down in a swivel desk-chair. "The forms should be in here." She opened a drawer of the desk and brought out a little sheaf of six or eight printed forms of different colors and sizes clipped together. She pulled off the clip and spread them under my desk lamp, turning on the lamp with the other hand. "They're all here. Just fill in the blanks, Mr. Morley; do this long one first. Here's a pen." She handed me a ball-point pen. "It shouldn't take long. Call me if you have any questions." She nodded at a small table beside my chair; the top was an intricate pattern of inlaid wood about a foot square, just large enough for the white phone it held. She smiled and walked out, closing the door.

Pen in hand, I sat looking around the room for a moment or so. A green filing cabinet stood on the wall opposite me; a mirror hung on the wall behind me; on the wall to my right beside the door was a small framed picture, a watercolor of a covered bridge, not bad work but pretty standard. That was all there was to see, and I looked down at the papers spread out under the desk lamp; they were withholding-tax forms, hospitalization, and the like. I pulled the long one to me — it was headed "Personnel Fact Sheet" — and began filling it out. In the first blanks I wrote my name; place of birth, Gary, Indiana; date of birth, March 11, 1942; wondering if anyone ever looked at these things. The phone on the little table at my elbow rang, and I swung around in my chair, picked it up, and an actual physical sensation of coldness moved up my spine because the phone was green. It had been white, I was certain of that, but now it was green. I said, "Hello?"

"Mr. Prien is back for you, Mr. Morley. Are you nearly finished?"

"Finished? I just started."

There was a moment's pause. "Just started? Mr. Morley, you've been at it" — there was a pause as though she might be consulting a watch — "over twenty minutes.''

I didn't know what to say to her. "You've made a mistake, Miss Macabee; I've barely begun."

I could detect the repressed annoyance in her voice. "Well, please finish up as quickly as you can, Mr. Morley. Mr. Prien has made an appointment with the director." She clicked off, and I slowly hung up the phone; could I possibly have drifted off into a daydream twenty minutes long? I turned back to the form I'd been filling out, then actually jumped to my feet in panic, my chair skidding back and banging the wall. There in the blanks under my name, birthplace, and date of birth were written my father's name, Earl Gavin Morley; his birthplace and date of birth, Muncie, Indiana, 1908; my mother's maiden name, Strong; my hobbies, sketching and photography; and my entire history of employment beginning with Neff Carter in Buffalo. All the other forms were filled out, too: every one of them, just like this, in my own unmistakable handwriting. It was impossible for me to have done this without knowing it, but there it was. It wasn't possible that twenty minutes had passed, but they must have. And the white phone — I glanced at it again — was still green. The hair on the back of my neck was prickling, trying to stand erect, and the fear in my stomach was like a clenching fist.