When I got to my room, I checked my watch and saw it was only 6:00 P.M. In the summer, the library didn’t open until noon but stayed open until eight. Long distance is one of the few things more expensive in 1960 than in 2011, but that childish sense of guilt was still on me. I called the hotel operator and gave her the Nokomis Library’s telephone number, reading it off the card-pocket pasted to the back flyleaf of the book. The little message below it, Please Call if You Will Be More Than 3 Days Late in Your Return, made me feel more like a dog than ever.
My operator talked to another operator. Behind them, faint voices babbled. I realized that in the time I came from, most of those distant speakers would be dead. Then the phone began to ring on the other end.
“Hello, Nokomis Public Library.” It was Hattie Wilkerson’s voice, but that sweet old lady sounded like she was stuck in a very large steel barrel.
“Hello, Mrs. Wilkerson-”
“Hello? Hello? Do you hear me? Drat long distance!”
“Hattie?” I was shouting now. “It’s George Amberson calling!”
“George Amberson? Oh, my soul! Where are you calling from, George?”
I almost told her the truth, but the hunch-radar gave out a single very loud ping and I bellowed, “Baton Rouge!”
“In Louisiana?”
“Yes! I have one of your books! I just realized! I’m going to send it ba-”
“You don’t need to shout, George, the connection is much better now. The operator must not have stuck our little plug in the whole way. I am so glad to hear from you. It’s God’s providence that you weren’t there. We were worried even though the fire chief said the house was empty.”
“What are you talking about, Hattie? My place on the beach?”
But really, what else?
“Yes! Someone threw a flaming bottle of gasoline through the window. The whole thing went up in a matter of minutes. Chief Durand thinks it was kids who were out drinking and carousing. There are so many bad apples now. It’s because they’re afraid of the Bomb, that’s what my husband says.”
So.
“George? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Which book do you have?”
“What?”
“Which book do you have? Don’t make me check the card catalogue.”
“Oh. The Chapman Report. ”
“Well, send it back as soon as you can, won’t you? We have quite a few people waiting for that one. Irving Wallace is extremely popular.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be sure to do that.”
“And I’m very sorry about your house. Did you lose your things?”
“I have everything important with me.”
“Thank God for that. Will you be coming back s-”
There was a click loud enough to sting my ear, then the burr of an open line. I replaced the receiver in the cradle. Would I be coming back soon? I saw no need to call back and answer that question. But I would watch out for the past, because it senses change-agents, and it has teeth.
I sent The Chapman Report back to the Nokomis Library first thing in the morning.
Then I left for Dallas.
Three days later I was sitting on a bench in Dealey Plaza and looking at the square brick cube of the Texas School Book Depository. It was late afternoon, and blazingly hot. I had pulled down my tie (if you don’t wear one in 1960, even on hot days, you’re apt to attract unwanted attention) and unbuttoned the top button of my plain white shirt, but it didn’t help much. Neither did the scant shade of the elm behind my bench.
When I checked into the Adolphus Hotel on Commerce Street, I was offered a choice: air-conditioning or no air-conditioning. I paid the extra five bucks for a room where the window-unit lowered the temperature all the way to seventy-eight, and if I had a brain in my head, I’d go back to it now, before I keeled over with heatstroke. When night came, maybe it would cool off. Just a little.
But that brick cube held my gaze, and the windows-especially the one on the right corner of the sixth floor-seemed to be examining me. There was a palpable sense of wrongness about the building. You-if there ever is a you-might scoff at that, calling it nothing but the effect of my unique foreknowledge, but that didn’t account for what was really holding me on that bench in spite of the beating heat. What did that was the sense that I had seen the building before.
It reminded me of the Kitchener Ironworks, in Derry.
The Book Depository wasn’t a ruin, but it conveyed the same sense of sentient menace. I remembered coming on that submerged, soot-blackened smokestack, lying in the weeds like a giant prehistoric snake dozing in the sun. I remembered looking into its dark bore, so large I could have walked into it. And I remembered feeling that something was in there. Something alive. Something that wanted me to walk into it. So I could visit. Maybe for a long, long time.
