“Look a little more like my old self, do I?” he asked in his gravelly voice as he sat down in the easy chair in front of the TV. Only he didn’t really sit, just kind of positioned himself and dropped.
“You do. What have the doctors told you?”
“The one I saw in Portland says there’s no hope, not even with chemo and radiation. Exactly what the doc I saw in Dallas said. In 1962, that was. Nice to think some things don’t change, don’t you think?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Sometimes there’s nothing to say. Sometimes you’re just stumped.
“No sense beating around the bush about it,” he said. “I know death’s embarrassing to folks, especially when the one dying has nothing but his own bad habits to blame, but I can’t waste time being delicate. I’ll be in the hospital soon enough, if for no other reason than I won’t be able to get back and forth to the bathroom on my own. I’ll be damned if I’ll sit around coughing my brains out and hip deep in my own shit.”
“What happens to the diner?”
“The diner’s finished, buddy. Even if I was healthy as a horse, it would be gone by the end of this month. You know I always just rented that space, don’t you?” I didn’t, but it made sense. Although Worumbo was still called Worumbo, it was now your basic trendy shopping center, so that meant Al had been paying rent to some corporation.
“My lease is up for renewal, and Mill Associates wants that space to put in something called
—you’re going to love this—an L.L. Bean Express. Besides, they say my little Aluminaire’s an eyesore.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I said, and with such genuine indignation that Al chuckled. The chuckles tried to morph into a coughing fit and he stifled them. Here in the privacy of his own home, he wasn’t using tissues, handkerchiefs, or napkins to deal with that cough; there was a box of maxi pads on the table beside his chair. My eyes kept straying to them. I’d urge them away, perhaps to look at the photo on the wall of Al with his arm around a good-looking woman, then find them straying back. Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.
“Thanks for saying that, buddy. We could have a drink on it. My alcohol days are over, but there’s iced tea in the fridge. Maybe you’d do the honors.” 2
He used sturdy generic glassware at the restaurant, but the pitcher holding the iced tea looked like Waterford to me. A whole lemon bobbed placidly on top, the skin cut to let the flavor seep out. I choked a couple of glasses with ice, poured, and went back into the living room. Al took a long, deep swallow of his and closed his eyes gratefully.
“Boy, is that good. Right this minute everything in Al World is good. That dope’s wonderful stuff. Addictive as hell, of course, but wonderful. It even suppresses the coughing a little. The pain’ll start creeping in again by midnight, but that should give us enough time to talk this through.” He sipped again and gave me a look of rueful amusement. “Human things are terrific right to the end, it seems like. I never would have guessed.”
“Al, what happens to that . . . that hole into the past, if they pull your trailer and build an outlet store where it was?”
“I don’t know that any more than I know how I can buy the same meat over and over again.
What I think is it’ll disappear. I think it’s as much a freak of nature as Old Faithful, or that weird balancing rock they’ve got in western Australia, or a river that runs backward at certain phases of the moon. Things like that are delicate, buddy. A little shift in the earth’s crust, a change in the temperature, a few sticks of dynamite, and they’re gone.”
“So you don’t think there’ll be . . . I don’t know . . . some kind of cataclysm?” What I was picturing in my mind was a breach in the cabin of an airliner cruising at thirty-six thousand feet, and everything being sucked out, including the passengers. I saw that in a movie once.
“I don’t think so, but who can tell? All I know is that there’s nothing I can do about it, either way. Unless you want me to deed the place over to you, that is. I could do that. Then you could go to the National Historical Preservation Society and tell them, ‘Hey, guys, you can’t let them put up an outlet store in the courtyard of the old Worumbo mill. There’s a time tunnel there. I know it’s hard to believe, but let me show you.’”
For a moment I actually considered this, because Al was probably right: the fissure leading into the past was almost certainly delicate. For all I knew (or he did), it could pop like a soap bubble if the Aluminaire was even joggled hard. Then I thought of the federal government discovering they could send special ops into the past to change whatever they wanted. I didn’t know if that were possible, but if so, the folks who gave us fun stuff like bio-weapons and computer-guided smart bombs were the last folks I’d want carrying their various agendas into living, unarmored history.
The minute this idea occurred to me—no, the very second—I knew what Al had in mind.
Only the specifics were missing. I set my iced tea aside and stood up.
“No. Absolutely not. Uh-uh.”
He took this calmly. I could say it was because he was stoned on OxyContin, but I knew better. He could see I didn’t mean to just walk out no matter what I said. My curiosity (not to mention my fascination) was probably sticking out like porcupine quills. Because part of me did want to know the specifics.
“I see I can skip the introductory material and get right down to business,” Al said. “That’s good. Sit down, Jake, and I’ll let you in on my only reason for not just taking my whole supply of little pink pills at once.” And when I stayed on my feet: “You know you want to hear this, and what harm? Even if I could make you do something here in 2011—which I can’t—I couldn’t make you do anything back there. Once you get back there, Al Templeton’s a four-year-old kid in Bloomington, Indiana, racing around his backyard in a Lone Ranger mask and still a bit iffy in the old toilet-training department. So sit down. Like they say in the infomercials, you’re under no obligation.”
Right. On the other hand, my mother would have said the devil’s voice is sweet.
But I sat down.
3
“Do you know the phrase watershed moment, buddy?” I nodded. You didn’t have to be an English teacher to know that one; you didn’t even have to be literate. It was one of those annoying linguistic shortcuts that show up on cable TV news shows, day in and day out. Others include connect the dots and at this point in time. The most annoying of all (I have inveighed against it to my clearly bored students time and time and time again) is the totally meaningless some people say, or many people believe.
“Do you know where it comes from? The origin?”
“Nope.”