Mr. Was Page 16

  After that, I tried to stay as far away from Boggs’s End as possible. I just wanted to go quietly mad, bothering no one. For several weeks, that was exactly what I did. I lay on my bed and tried not to think, leaving the trailer only when I needed supplies, which was about once a week. Making a supply run was no small chore. My car had died two winters before, so I had to walk the three miles up River Street to Ole’s Quick Stop.

  On one such trip I noticed the door to the old train depot—now the Memory Institute—standing wide open. During my three years in Memory I had never known the Institute to be open at all. I’d looked through the grimy window once. It had looked to me like somebody’s attic. A bunch of dusty junk. Ole told me that the guy who owned the building stopped by every now and then, but that the Institute hadn’t been open any regular hours since the seventies.

  One thing about going quietly and privately insane: It gets pretty boring after a while. Instead of going into Ole’s, I crossed the street and peered in through the open door.

  The interior of the one-room building was even more cluttered and filthy than I’d imagined. A single bare lightbulb hung head high from a cord in the center of the room. Stacks of old books, photographs, and maps were piled haphazardly on rickety-looking chairs, tables, and unidentifiable articles of furniture. The walls were covered with yellowing black-and-white photos, nearly all of which seemed to be of stern, bearded men and frowning women, all wearing too much clothing.

  At the back of the room, a man was bent over a large cardboard box. He removed an old leather-bound book, snorted, tossed it across the room onto a pile of similar books.

  “Another Swedish bible,” he muttered. “Like I need another.”

  As soon as I heard his voice I recognized Pinky, the man I’d met at Boggs’s End. I waited for him to notice me.

  He tossed aside a few more books, then turned to me and said, “Where have you been?”

  “What do you mean?” I replied.

  “You can’t see him, can you?”

  “See who?”

  “Jack Lund. Jack Lund. Jack Lund.”

  I shook my head, confused. “I thought I was Jack Lund.”

  “You are. You were. You will be.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who are you? You are my accident, Jack Lund. You can’t see him, can you? Of course you can’t. He is your echo, not now.”

  The man was not making any sense. I decided to change the subject, if there was one. “You told me that Skoro was my grandfather.”

  Pinky stood up and brushed dust from his black wool trousers. “I did?”

  “Yes, when we talked up at the house. That’s not possible, you know.”

  He shook his head. “I wasn’t going to do that until before. What else did I tell you?”

  “What goes around comes around.”

  Pinky laughed and slapped his hands against the lapels of his heavy black coat, sending out twin puffs of dust. “That was true,” he said. “Do you have any more questions?”

  “I met a woman in the orchard. Who was she?”

  “She will be your mother.”

  “That’s impossible, too,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You have lost your memory, yet you believe you know what will be and what was not possible. You are assuming that different realities cannot coexist. You assumed that it is impossible to have traveled from this time to that time, that there cannot be two of you, that your reality will be more profound than that of your echo.” He paused, combing his beard with his thick fingers.

  “What are you saying? Are you are saying that I traveled through time?”

  “Not through. Against. Now you are going with. We are travelers together, for this moment, racing into the future. Do you understand?”

  “Tell me one thing. What year was I born?”

  “By your calendar? Nineteen seventy-nine.”

  “That’s im——”

  Pinky held up a hand, silencing me.

  “You will remember more, but you will not like it.

  Do not be in such a hurry.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Your self.”

  “You are not living in the present. But then, who was?” He looked at his hairy wrist. There was no watch, but he said, “Look at the time! Can I help you? We’re closing up here. Would you like to have bought a Swedish bible?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, backing out the door.

  “You have things to do. Don’t let me keep you. Have you spoken with your father yet? He was waiting, you know. Take care now. Good day!”

  The door closed. Pinky’s big bearded face stared at me through the dust-coated window. I started back up the road, my mind whirling with confused images. The man was obviously mad, yet all that he had said—senseless as it was—rang true.

  I headed back across the street toward Ole’s, and had only taken a few steps when I heard a crunch of tires on gravel and looked up to see a bicycle coming at me, moving fast, pedals churning, but without a rider. During the endless two seconds while I watched it coming at me, I remember thinking that I should step out of the way, but I couldn’t move. I stood there stupidly until the handlebars hit me belt-high, knocking me to the ground.

  The next few moments exist as a blur in my memory. I recall sitting up, wondering whether I had broken anything. As I watched, the bicycle righted itself and moved slowly away, as if someone was pushing it.

  I stood up, a little shaky but nothing broken. My mind churned with a new memory.

  I was sixteen years old again, coming out of Ole’s, upset because—

  A wave of dizziness rolled over me. I staggered to the side of the road and sat down.

  —because Dad was drinking again. The last thing I remembered was getting on my bike and riding—

  —that must have been when I ran into myself.

  My recovered memory ended with that moment. I looked back at the Memory Institute. The light had been turned off, the CLOSED sign was propped in the window.

  One thing Pinky had said reverberated in my thoughts.

  “You will remember more,” he’d said, “but you will not like it.”

  I walked back to my rented trailer in a daze. By the time I arrived, the sun had disappeared behind the bluffs and I had rediscovered much of my past.

  I remembered growing up in Skokie.

  I remembered friends from school.

  I remembered the neighborhood, and the cocker spaniel named Muffer who had lived next door.

  Moving like a robot, I opened a can of sugary Boston baked beans and poured its contents into a dented aluminum saucepan. I heated it on the propane stove, spooned the beans onto slices of rye bread, and ate slowly as memories played out like a movie in my mind.

  I remembered my parents. I remembered them fighting. I remembered the time my dad had beat up my mom and then hit me in the stomach.

  I remembered my grandfather, who had tried to kill me on his deathbed.

  I remembered my first visit to Boggs’s End.

  I remembered the door.

  And that was when it began to make sense to me. If it was possible to travel through time, as Pinky had been trying to tell me, then it was possible that I was not insane.

  I remembered Scud.

  I remembered Andie. I remembered visiting her with Scud, and I remembered her kissing Scud.

  That memory had lost none of its sting. It might as well have been yesterday.

  I sat in a trance at that tiny table exploring my mind. I let some memories roll out slowly, relishing each moment. Other memories I had to rush through, or push aside for later. Long into the night, I played with the contents of my mind, but I could not remember my final trip into the past.

  I could not remember anything that the young Jack had not yet experienced.

  Sometime in the last dark hours, I returned in my mind to the scene that morning, to my collision with the invisible bicyclist who I now knew to be myself. Hours ago, I had remembered
only events leading up to the collision. I had been unable to recall what I— the young Jack Lund—had done afterward.

  But now I remembered walking my broken bike back up the bluff. I remembered my mother in the kitchen, sitting with the table set, the food cold, waiting for me and my father to return. I remembered her locking the door. I remembered the shouting, and the sound of his car being driven through the front doors into the foyer—

  —and something released its grip on my past to clamp my heart in its icy grip—

  —and I remembered that night. I remembered this night.

  Between my trailer and Boggs’s End lay perhaps four miles of wooded coulee and ridge. I do not know how long it took me to make the trip—it seemed an eternity of whipping branches, stabbing thorns, and ankle-grabbing roots. I must have fallen dozens of times. By the time I burst out of the woods into the orchard, the sun had risen, my clothing was torn, and my face and hands were bloody with scratches.

  The man wearing my father’s face stood amongst the fallen apples. At his ankles, a few sluggish hornets buzzed over the rotting fruit. Steam rose where the low sun struck dew-coated grass. My father turned toward me, his face slack and pale, the pupils of his eyes reduced to the size of pinheads. A streak of drying blood ran up the inside of his forearm.

  He said, “It’s too late. She made me do it.”

  I shook my head. “No she didn’t.”

  He said, “I suppose you’re right.” He took a few steps to the side, reached up, and tugged at the rope clothesline. “I put this up for her, you know. The dryer was broke, so I put up the clothesline for her. I did a lot of things for her. I used to have a job.” He followed the rope to the branch and began working at the knot.

  As I watched him, new memories solidified in my mind. I remembered lying on the floor beside my mother’s body. I remember standing up and looking out the window and seeing this scene from above. I looked toward the house. There was the window, but of course I was not visible to myself.

  My father had the rope untied from one tree. He dragged the loose end back along the rope’s length and went to work untying the other end.

  I suddenly remembered why I had made that final trip into the past. A journey of over half a century, and I had failed. I had gone back to save my mother from this man, and all for nothing. I had forgotten my mission until it was too late.

  Now he was climbing the tree. He stood on one branch and tied one end of the rope to a branch higher up. He made a loop in the rope, tied another knot.

  I started to walk away. I had an idea what was about to happen.

  Just before I entered the woods, I heard a dull, snapping sound. I looked back. His legs were still kicking, only inches above the rotting apples.

  If I was an old man then, I am a very, very old man now. It still hurts to write these words, but the pain and terror has dulled with the passing years, and I have come to accept my fate as inevitable. As Pinky would say, It will be bound to have happened.

  I spent the next few months in my trailer, going out only to buy food, living on beans and cheap peanut butter, down to my last few dollars and with no will to go out and earn more. I might have simply stayed there and eventually starved to death, but as Pinky would say, I wasn’t going to have died then.

  I was on my bed buried in layers of blankets, searching my mind for a peaceful place, when someone banged on the door. They had to knock hard and repeatedly before I realized that it was a real sound, not something reverberating from my past. I rolled out of the tangle of bedding and opened the door.

  It was Pinky. Behind him, a long black limousine sat idling by the roadside.

  He said, “How were you?”

  I shook my head.

  “There is something I should not have told you.” His dark eyes glittered, filled with moisture. “There is that which is permitted, and that which was forbidden. The rules will be nowhere written down. They are discovered by accident, and often never understood by those who unwittingly break them.”

  I must have looked confused.

  Pinky said, “It is a difficult concept. I can tell you this: Those who violate the rules must pay. Some pay now, some pay later.” He smiled. “Later is better.”

  He handed me an envelope. Writing on the front of the envelope said simply, Jack.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “From the papers bequeathed to the Institute,” he said. “You should have it.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I did.” With that, he walked back to his limo and climbed in the back. I caught a glimpse of a woman and two children inside. The limo pulled away.

  I sat on the step and opened the envelope.

  July 15, 1981

  Dear Jack,

  I know you’ll never read this. But you must have known that I would never read your letters to me— and yet I did, thanks to Tadashi and Sawako Tsurumi, who came all the way from Tokyo to shatter what little peace I had left in my life.

  If I have learned anything today, it is that everything I believed until now is untrue. My husband is not the man I thought I married, my daughter is doomed, and my only grandchild will not survive his eighteenth birthday. There is no happiness left for me, so I’m going to leave, as you did, as have all my loved ones, even if they do not yet know it.

  Of all the terrible things you described in your letters to me, the most terrible of all was the revelation that your grandfather—your murderous grandfather—was named Skoro.

  Not a common name.

  It was Scud’s mother’s maiden name, and as soon as the war ended and Scud returned here to Memory, that’s what he had his name changed to. Ever since we were kids, Scud has talked about changing his name. You remember how much he hated his father? He didn’t want to be named after him. We all thought it was a bit strange—small-town folks usually stick with their birth names—but you know Scud. He made his mind up and just went and did it.

  That’s how I became Andrea Skoro.

  It never would’ve happened if you’d come back alive, Jack. I can’t tell you how broke up I was when I heard you were missing and probably dead. But Scud came back and we took up just like we had been before I met you, before the war. The next thing I knew, we were married. And Scud started making lots of money in the stock market, and he bought this house and had it all fixed up, and I had a baby and planted hollyhocks, and Scud planted the apple orchard, and life went on.

  It was never a good marriage. Scud is a cruel man in many ways. But it was my lot to be with him, I thought.

  No more. I’m getting old. He’s had too much of me already. I’m going back.

  The door is there, just like you said.

  Scud will be back soon, looking for his dinner. He can look for it the rest of his life.

  Love,

  Andie

  Andrea Island, Puerto Rico

  September 2, 1952

  I keep thinking my story is over, but Andie wants me to keep on writing.

  After reading the letter she had written to me, I knew I had to see her again.

  I had to break a window to get in. Everything was gone. The furniture, the books, the pictures on the walls, all gone. I didn’t care about that. I climbed the stairs, fighting off memories. I went into the third-floor closet, through the door, down the steps. The metal door was waiting for me. Without hesitating, I opened it into a moonlit night. The apple trees were bare, the grass dry and dead, but the air felt warm and moist.

  She stood outside the house in a light coat, her red hair gray now, her bright green eyes dancing in nests of wrinkled flesh.

  She said, “Hello, Jack.”

  “Andie?”

  “Pinky told me I might find you here.”

  “Pinky? You know Pinky?”

  “Yes. I thought you were dead, until he told me to come for you.”

  “I thought I was dead, too,” I said.

  She reached out a hand, and I took it.
r />   “What time is this?” I asked.

  “You don’t remember this night? It’s December sixth.”

  “It’s warm,” I said, remembering.

  “Let’s go,” Andie said, tugging at my arm. We walked around the house to the driveway and got into her car, a long black Cadillac sedan. “I have a lot of money now,” she said. “It’s easy when you know who will win the World Series every year.”

  I remembered something Pinky had told me. “That’s a violation of the rules,” I said.

  “What rules?”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  She slid behind the wheel and put the big car in gear. We rolled out of the driveway onto the dirt road.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going home. I live in the Caribbean now. No more winters.”

  “And what then?”

  She shrugged. “And then we live for a while. At least twelve more years. I want to see my daughter one more time.”

  “And then?”

  “Eventually we die.”

  I nodded. It made sense. I sank back into the leather seat and watched the trees flashing in the headlights. After a couple miles, she stopped.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  “Watch.” She turned off the engine and the headlights. The moonlight was so bright, we could see shadows. A few minutes later, a figure emerged from the darkness, walking down the opposite side of the road. A girl with long hair. Even from a distance I knew who she was by the way she walked. The young Andie. She seemed to be holding something in her right hand, but there was nothing visible there. Nevertheless, I knew she had someone’s hand. I could still feel the pressure of her fingers.

  “I can see you,” said my grandmother.

  “I can see you,” I said.

  As I watched, the girl stopped. She turned toward our car, pointed. Andie let the clutch out and the car moved along the shoulder, passing the girl and her invisible companion. I looked back. She was staring at us, her eyes wide, a hand pressed to her slim white throat.

  In 1942, Andrea Skoro and Jack Lund bought a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico, where they resided for the next ten years. On September 5, 1952, though both Andrea and Jack appeared to be nearly eighty years old, the pair decided to journey to Skokie, Illinois.