Changing the Past (6 page)

She smiled. “Not bloody likely, but I do think I've found a good prospect for the Horning.” Martha was an excellent saleswoman, with a deceptively soft approach that often proved effective with initially resistant clients. Not only could she sell a huge house to someone who wanted a cottage, but such a buyer seldom displayed a subsequent regret. She was a large woman, not fat in the sense of ill-proportioned, but big. She was as tall as her husband, which meant taller in high heels, and looked as though she would weigh more, but that was an illusion, though in fact he was slender for his age. He had always found her a reassuring presence, yet now could not as yet find a way to tell her about the unsettling encounter with the strange little man.

“Great,” he said now. “But we'd better not spend the commission before you collect it.” He made the same comment with respect to every imminent sale. She agreed as always. Surely one of the reasons why they had been satisfactorily married so long was that they never quarreled about money. Both were conservatives in that area, having little taste for gloss and frippery, but shared an interest in providing Elliot with the best education and, when that had been accomplished, improving the house in which they were domiciled and the grounds around it. Last year the entire side yard had been resodded.

As always he let Martha out of the car at the top of the driveway and then continued on to the garage, before which he braked and, having found the gadget in the glove compartment, pressed the button that caused the garage door to rise. Inside, as he left the car, he reflected as usual on the need to take one whole Saturday and throw out the accumulation of useless material that filled most of the space which, had they owned one, would have been occupied by a second vehicle. Some of this—a snow tire, the frame of an old window screen, a rolled-up throw rug—constituted a fire hazard.

Before entering the house by the back door, he glanced towards the dogwoods at the bottom of the garden. He could never call a season spring until their blooming: they still had several weeks to go. It had been a dry winter. The heavy city rain would have been welcome, but as sometimes happened, none had fallen here, by the look of things.

The back door was still locked when he tried to turn the knob. Martha hadn't got there yet. He found the proper key amongst the several in the little leatherbound booklet he carried in the right trousers pocket, and let himself in. It had been the universal practice throughout the neighborhood, twenty years before, never to lock a door: of course that had changed.

Passing through the kitchen, where, judging from the aroma, something was simmering in the Crock Pot, he heard his wife's murmur from the top of the hallway. She had been detained there by a telephone call. Because he would have had to squeeze past her if he continued on that route, he took the circuitous one that went via the dining and living rooms, and emerged in the vestibule between the front door and the little desk at the beginning of the hall, where Martha stood, holding the phone at the level of her waist, neither speaking into it nor listening.

Her unusual expression alarmed him. “Not an obscene call?” he asked, remembering that Dorothy Kalergis, at work, had recently complained of receiving such, and had been militantly advised by her colleague Carrie Janes to keep a police whistle at phoneside to use on the next occasion: “Shatter his goddamn eardrums!”

“It's Elliot,” Martha said at last, in a voice that went with her lusterless eyes.

“He's back?” Elliot had been abroad for a month and a half, taking a spring vacation to Paris—which went to show how well he was doing at the law firm, at which he had been employed less than three years. As it happened, Hunsicker himself had never been closer to Paris than the city of Québec. He had married young and soon thereafter had a child to bring up and educate. Since Elliot had been out on his own, domestic things—resodding lawns, conversions from oil to gas heat, etc.—had taken all the extra money. “If you're done,” he said now to Martha, “let me talk to him.” But the best time to hear Elliot's account of the trip—he was a marvelous raconteur—would be over a long dinner of the substantial kind: beef or leg of lamb. Elliot had in the last year taken up the practice of smoking an expensive cigar after such a meal. His father admired the elegance of all phases of the process in which his son, who had been fastidious even as a small child, pierced the chocolate-brown tube with a little vest-pocket tool of gold, then painstakingly applied to the cigar's end the intense blue flame of an engine-turned^ golden lighter, extending the snow-white cuffs of his shirt, discreetly exposing the small cuff links, also gold, exquisite in their simplicity. Everything about Elliot was classic. Hunsicker was wont sometimes to wonder where his son had acquired such style, which was unique on either side of the family.

“Well,” he now said impatiently to Martha, who seemed frozen in position, “are you finished?”

“It's Elliot,” she repeated stupidly, still not focusing her eyes.

“I
know
that, Martha,” Hunsicker said, reaching. “I'd like to talk with him, if you don't mind.”

“He's dying,” Martha said.

“He's joking.”

“He has AIDS,” Martha said, in a tone of controlled reason. “That's why he was in Paris, you see: to try a new treatment.”

“No,” Hunsicker said firmly. “That's not possible. Elliot's too brilliant to contract a lethal disease. This can't be serious. I want to hear about Paris and the meals he ate there. Is he coming up for dinner on Saturday?”

Martha's expression was still more blank than anguished: that was what gave him such hope that all this was illusion. “We can't get to the hospital till tomorrow,” she said. “Visiting hours would be over before we reached town.” At last she hung up the telephone. “There's stew. You should eat something. I'm not hungry, and I can't sit down right now.”

Hunsicker clutched at her. “Please believe me: this does not have to happen! I can get it changed.”

“Walter,” his wife said wearily, “try to get hold of yourself. I'm going to take a pill now and try to sleep.”

“No, no that isn't—” But she had not stayed to listen, had instead gone upstairs and into the bathroom. He realized that there was no credible means by which the truth could be revealed to her at this point, if ever.

II

N
EXT
MORNING
after a sleepless night behind the wheel of his car, Hunsicker drove to the city. From 8:50 on, he knocked at the door of the medical-equipment shop, but not until 9 sharp did the little man let him in.

In the back office he related the terrible news. “I'm sorry I didn't take you as seriously as I should have yesterday. I need your help.” He leaned forward. “I'll do anything to save Elliot's life.”

“Including changing the past so that he never existed?”

“It wouldn't be possible just to go back and change
him
?”

The little man gasped in disapproval. “My goodness, you can't exercise a line-item veto when it comes to these matters: you have to take the package. If you'd like a heterosexual son, you've got to take what else comes with him. He could be mentally impaired, for example. Or he might have other carnal tastes that are abhorrent, even criminal. Also, if the past were changed in this respect, there would be consequences: if you replace Elliot with another son, you'll necessarily change your wife as well: flesh of her flesh, you see. That could not be changed.”

This was not a shock to Hunsicker by now: it was one of the things that had kept him awake through the night—though to be sure he could not envision a life in which Martha had never been: something different from her suddenly dying.

“It's simply that I can't condemn him to a horrible death.
He's
not at fault:
we
made him. That was all our idea. Martha would do what I'm doing if she could. I know that. As it happens, only I have the power.” He would have wept now, had he not felt the need to give his son a tribute. “Let me tell you about Elliot: he would stop me if he knew about this. That's the sort of man he is. If given the choice, he'd rather die this way than have the past changed so that his mother would never have existed for me. Elliot's the most generous person I have ever known. He was like that as a little child. For that matter, he might even prefer his current fate to never having existed. He so loves life! He has never slunk about in shame, nor did he ever make a spectacle of himself. He was what he was, a sweet man, an ethical man, a fine man.” Now at last he let the tears come.

The medical-equipment dealer was embarrassed by this display, and spun round in the chair and fetched the spooled paper from the appropriate slot of the rolltop desk.

He turned back. “All right, what will it be?”

After a moment Hunsicker was able to speak again. “I'm beginning to understand what a responsibility this can be. I'm scared of making a bad mistake…. Is there a rule against
your
choosing something for me?”

The little man scowled at the ceiling and shook his head.

“I won't blame you if it turns out badly,” Hunsicker said earnestly. “It's just that this thing has really shattered my confidence. And by changing the past, I end up in effect killing my son anyway, don't I, as well as my wife? I'm saving them a lot of suffering, and therefore it must be done. But I'm giving up most of my own life, as I knew it, and stepping into the unknown…. I'm sorry. I'm being ungrateful. I'm aware that this is a unique privilege.”

“Please,” said the other, with a lifting of wrists. “Don't say such things. We're not doing you a favor. It's just an agreement, fair and square. You do your part, we do ours. There's no need to be grateful or humble.”

“I've been thinking about this all night,” said Hunsicker. “Changing my whole life! I don't know how or where to start.”

“Loosen up a little. You're forgetting that the decision need not be permanent. This is not as solemn as you are making yourself believe.”

“I've always taken life seriously,” Hunsicker said. “I hope I've not been humorless, but existence has never seemed like a joke to me.”

“Maybe you've been wrong,” said the little man. “You might do worse than to try the lighter approach.”

Hunsicker considered the matter. “Yes, that first brief experience as the rich slumlord and lecher wasn't exactly light-hearted, was it? It was too concerned with the ugly assertion of power. You might be right. But wouldn't it be mockery of my reason for being here? To flee tragedy into farce?”

“You really ought to free yourself from those old ways of looking at things” the little man said. “What other people have told you all your life might not be the whole truth but rather a version that will further their own ends with no regard whatever for yours. You are here being given the opportunity to arrange something on your own terms. You'll waste it if you insist on inconsequential considerations. Your object at the moment is to do away with your son's fatal illness. What difference would it make however you accomplished this end?”

Suddenly Hunsicker's burden seemed to have been lifted. “Okay, I'll try being Jack Kellog again, this time with a sense of humor.”

The little man made a notation on the wretched scrap of paper and returned it to the cubbyhole. It was incomprehensible to Kellog that an organization with sufficient resources to develop a means of changing the past would have such a squalid office, but that was not his business. He could have no complaint as long as the process was working.

K
ELLOG'S
COMIC
talents had appeared with his adolescence and a concomitant gain in weight that, by the middle of his freshman year in high school, had made him much chubbier than one could be and have much social success in the routine way. Not to mention that the morning came when he woke up with a face that was badly pimpled. (When his acne finally went away with the end of his pubescence, moonlike craters remained as a memory of the lesions.) He had no talents at sports, nor was he a good student. He masturbated four times a day, week in and week out, often into successive pairs of women's panties shoplifted from the lingerie department of a five-and-dime (he would have paid for these could he have done so gracefully). In any kind of competition with persons of his own age, he was at a loss; in any conflict he was likely to prove the coward. Yet, in spite of so many negative attributes, his determination to prevail remained undiminished—something he could not himself understand, and he was always careful to conceal it from others, with the exception of his parents, to whom he was wont to predict great personal success for himself when the time was ripe.

“I'm holding my breath,” his father, a clerk, would say derisively, “so don't take too long.” He had the dreariest parents of anybody he knew: no wonder that gaining distinction was a hard row to hoe.

Then one day, after a rain, he slipped on some wet leaves and performed an accidental pratfall to the asphalted surface of the schoolyard. At first it seemed unfortunate that he was at the time amidst many of his homeward-bound schoolmates, all of whom, having no other distraction at the moment, laughed uproariously. He was no stranger to the derision of a few persons at a time, but the response to what could be termed a real audience was unique to him, and far from being crushed by their laughter, he hungered for more of it. He proceeded to fall three more times before reaching the limits of school property, doing so now on purpose, and on each occasion making a more elaborate thing of it than he had on the last: throwing his books into the air, kicking off his loafers at the moment of impact, finally producing a shattering Bronx cheer that simulated a fart—the best effect of all, for though most of the girls professed to be disgusted by this,
everybody
made some kind of reaction, and Kellog, who had heretofore experienced far more disregard than condemnation, realized that he had stumbled upon a principle essential to him who seeks acclaim from his fellows:
viz
., that even to inspire derision is to have made one's mark.