Jack Finney - Time and Again

"I think I like it. I think possibly…" She hesitated, then continued, "They're very strange, but I think possibly I'd come to like these things." Once more she looked slowly up and down the length of Fifth Avenue. "Even these buildings." She shook her head. "Who could believe it? Who could ever imagine this?"

At Forty-second Street we looked at the soot-marked white building of the main Public Library, and I marveled with Julia at the absence of the great slant-walled reservoir. Then — she needed rest from looking — I took her to a small bar I remembered on Thirty-ninth Street. At first she refused to go to "a saloon," but then she accepted the knowledge that today women did many things they once hadn't done.

We had a table off in a corner away from the bar, only one other couple there, whispering in a corner. Julia had a glass of wine, I had whiskey-and-soda, and Julia relaxed. By tacit agreement we hadn't talked until now about what we'd left behind us; we'd needed relief from it, and had had it, but now again we talked of the fire… of Jake Pickering… of Carmody's strange behavior, and our flight from Inspector Byrnes. In this room, the sounds of today's New York a part of the very air, the names we spoke sounded odd to me, remote, even faintly comical. To have actually been frightened of walrus-mustached Inspector Byrnes who had never heard of fingerprints seemed absurd; had we really been scared or only participating in some sort of harmless make-believe? That was something of the tenor of my thoughts as we quietly talked over our drinks, and the reason I spoke with a little smile. But Julia was serious, not understanding my smile, and of course I understood that for her we were talking of a world in which Byrnes, Pickering, Carmody, and the fire in the World Building were far more real than this.

We said nothing new; we were only obeying a necessity to talk things over. Julia was worried about what her aunt would be thinking now, and hanging unspoken over everything we said was the question of Julia's future. But that needed time to work out, and I said nothing about it because I had nothing to say, though I had a lot to think about.

I had other things to show Julia, and after a while we left, and found a cab. It was still light, and I took Julia down to the Empire State Building, and we went up to the observation floor. In the elevator during the long long express ride past dozens of floors, Julia watched the floor-number panel, trying to believe we were really moving up this fast and this high, and her hand, holding mine, squeezed tight in the realization that we were. On the stone-railed open-air platform some ninety-odd floors above the earth, she looked out over the hazed city, making herself understand that here high over Thirty-fourth Street the distant greenery far ahead was really Central Park, and that the network of car-filled streets spread out far below us was really the city she'd known intimately but here no longer did. She looked out at the city, the park, the rivers. Then she looked around at the sky and pointed out a remarkable cloud; she'd never seen one anything like it before. I looked, and in a sense I suppose it really was a cloud — it had become one. High in the sky the air must have been windless, and a jet trail, its sharp edges gone, had puffed itself up into an absolutely straight, thin, mile-long cloud touched by the lowering sun. And then I, too, saw it not as a jet trail but as a strange elongated, ruler-straight cloud, and had one more glimpse of the different view Julia had of my world.

She was interested when I told her what the cloud really was; and she enjoyed her visit up here, impressed and excited by it. But presently she turned from the railing, sighing a little, and said, "And now it's enough, Si; this is all I can stand right now. Please take me home."

So instead of a restaurant for dinner — I'd meant to show off one of the nicer places — we stopped at my building's delicatessen, and I picked up some chopped steak and frozen vegetables. The vegetables — corn and some broccoli frozen hard and sealed in transparent plastic, and which I dropped into boiling water in their sacks — fascinated Julia. As we all do, she liked the easiness of preparing them, but of course the taste or tastelessness was something else, though she was polite.

We took our coffee into the living room, and, refreshed and revived, Julia said, "I've seen your world now, Si; I've had a glimpse of it, anyway. Now tell me what's been happening during all the years — it's so strange to say this — between my time and this." She snuggled back into the davenport cushions, looking at me as expectantly as a child about to hear a story.

I suppose I responded to her smile and expectation of pleasure, because — pausing to think, Where do you begin? How do you sum up decades? — I found myself hunting for good things to say. "Well, smallpox has been almost eliminated; you never see pock-marks now. And cholera. I don't suppose there's been even a case of it for years. Not in the United States, anyway." Julia nodded. "And polio — infantile paralysis. It's been just about eliminated, at least in all the big civilized countries."

She nodded again; she seemed to have expected this. "And heart disease, too? And cancer?"

"Well, no, not yet. But we're replacing hearts! Surgically removing the damaged heart and replacing it with another one from someone who just died."

"That's miraculous! And they live?"

"Well, not too long, usually. It doesn't really work very well. But it will."

"And how long do people live? To a hundred or more, I'm sure. I read a prediction in the Atlantic Monthly — "

"Actually, Julia, people don't seem to be living much longer, if at all, than in your time. Matter of fact, there are some new things that, ah — are killing us off and shortening our lives that don't exist in your time. Air pollution, for example. But we have air conditioning."

"What's that?"

"Machines that cool off the air in summer."

"Everywhere?"

"No, no; just indoors. I've got one in the bedroom — that thing in the window, if you noticed it. During a hot spell it'll cool the air to seventy degrees."

"What a luxury."

"Yeah, it's pretty nice. And they have them in most offices now, restaurants, movies, hotels."

"What are movies? You've mentioned them before."

I explained that they were like television only much larger, much clearer, and — every now and then — much better. Then I found myself talking about electric blankets, supermarkets, radar, air travel, automatic washers, dishwashers, and even, Lord forgive me, freeways.

Julia finished the last of her coffee, picked up my empty cup and saucer, and took it with hers to the kitchen. She walked back into the living room saying, "But what's been happening, Si? Tell me about that." As I thought about it, in terms of actual events, she began wandering about the room, fingering the drapes, looking at the back of the television set, flicking the overhead light fixture on and off a few times. I was stuck for an answer. It reminded me of letter writing; you can fill several pages describing a weekend, but try bringing an old friend up-to-date with the events of the last five years, and it's not so easy. What had happened in more than a lifetime?

"Well, there are fifty states now."

"Fifty?"

"Yep," I said as smugly as though I'd created them. "All the territories are states now. Also Alaska and Hawaii. And they've changed the flag; it has fifty stars now."

Julia nodded, interested; she was poking through the magazine rack at the end of the davenport, and now she pulled out a newspaper.

"And, let's see. Well, there was an earthquake in San Francisco in… 1906, I think. The city was pretty well destroyed, mostly by the fire afterward."