Come on in, the sixth-floor window whispered. Take a look around. The place is empty now, the skeleton crew that works here in the summer has gone home, but if you walk around to the loading dock by the railroad tracks, you’ll find an open door, I’m quite sure of it. After all, what is there in here to protect? Nothing but schoolbooks, and even the students they’re meant for don’t really want them. As you well know, Jake. So come in. Come on up to the sixth floor. In your time there’s a museum here, people come from all over the world and some of them still weep for the man who was killed and all he might have done, but this is 1960, Kennedy’s still a senator, and Jake Epping doesn’t exist. Only George Amberson exists, a man with a short haircut and a sweaty shirt and a pulled-down tie. A man of his time, so to speak. So come on up. Are you afraid of ghosts? How can you be, when the crime hasn’t happened yet?
But there were ghosts up there. Maybe not on Magazine Street in New Orleans, but there? Oh yes. Only I’d never have to face them, because I was going to enter the Book Depository no more than I had ventured into that fallen smokestack in Derry. Oswald would get his job stacking textbooks just a month or so before the assassination, and waiting that long would be cutting things far too close. No, I intended to follow the plan Al had roughed out in the closing section of his notes, the one titled CONCLUSIONS ON HOW TO PROCEDE.
Sure as he was about his lone gunman theory, Al had held onto a small but statistically significant possibility that he was wrong. In his notes, he called it “the window of uncertainty.”
As in sixth-floor window.
He had meant to close that window for good on April 10, 1963, over half a year before Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, and I thought his idea made sense. Possibly later that April, more likely on the night of the tenth-why wait?-I would kill the husband of Marina and the father of June just as I had Frank Dunning. And with no more compunction. If you saw a spider scuttering across the floor toward your baby’s crib, you might hesitate. You might even consider trapping it in a bottle and putting it out in the yard so it could go on living its little life. But if you were sure that spider was poisonous? A black widow? In that case, you wouldn’t hesitate. Not if you were sane.
You’d put your foot on it and crush it.
I had a plan of my own for the years between August of 1960 and April of 1963. I’d keep my eye on Oswald when he came back from Russia, but I wouldn’t interfere. Because of the butterfly effect, I couldn’t afford to. If there’s a stupider metaphor than a chain of events in the English language, I don’t know what it is. Chains (other than the ones we all learned to make out of strips of colored paper in kindergarten, I suppose) are strong. We use them to pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the arms and legs of dangerous prisoners. That was no longer reality as I understood it. Events are flimsy, I tell you, they are houses of cards, and by approaching Oswald-let alone trying to warn him off a crime which he had not yet even conceived-I would be giving away my only advantage. The butterfly would spread its wings, and Oswald’s course would change.
Little changes at first, maybe, but as the Bruce Springsteen song tells us, from small things, baby, big things one day come. They might be good changes, ones that would save the man who was now the junior senator from Massachusetts. But I didn’t believe that. Because the past is obdurate. In 1962, according to one of Al’s scribbled marginal notes, Kennedy was going to be in Houston, at Rice University, making a speech about going to the moon. Open auditorium, no bullet-pr’f podium, Al had written. Houston was less than three hundred miles from Dallas. What if Oswald decided to shoot the president there?
Or suppose Oswald was exactly what he claimed to be, a patsy? What if I scared him out of Dallas and back to New Orleans and Kennedy still died, the victim of some crazy Mafia or CIA plot? Would I have courage enough to go back through the rabbit-hole and start all over? Save the Dunning family again? Save Carolyn Poulin again? I had already given nearly two years to this mission. Would I be willing to invest five more, with the outcome as uncertain as ever?
Better not to have to find out.
Better to make sure.
On my way to Texas from New Orleans, I had decided the best way to monitor Oswald without getting in his way would be to live in Dallas while he was in the sister city of Fort Worth, then relocate to Fort Worth when Oswald moved his family to Dallas. The idea had the virtue of simplicity, but it wouldn’t work. I realized that in the weeks after looking at the Texas School Book Depository for the first time and feeling very strongly that it was-like Nietzsche’s abyss-looking back at me.
