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I shook my head.
“Think a minute. How many little explorations and shopping trips did your cook friend make even
before he got the idea of going to Dallas to stop Oswald? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?”
I tried to remember how long Al’s Diner had stood in the mill courtyard and couldn’t. “Probably
even more than that.”
“And what did he tell you? Each trip was the first time?”
“Yes. A complete reset.”
He laughed wearily. “Sure he did. People believe what they see. And still, he should have known
better. You should have known better. Each trip creates its own string, and when you have enough
strings, they always get snarled. Did it ever cross your friend’s mind to wonder how he could buy the
same meat over and over? Or why things he brought from 1958 never disappeared when he made the
next trip?”
“I asked him about that. He didn’t know, so he dismissed it.”
He started to smile, but it turned into a wince. The green once more started to fade out of the card
stuck in his hat. He dragged deep on his sweet-smelling cigarette. The color returned and steadied.
“Yeah, ignoring the obvious. It’s what we all do. Even after his sanity began to totter, Kyle
undoubtedly knew that his trips to yonder liquor store were making his condition worse, but he went
on, regardless. I don’t blame him; I’m sure the wine eased his pain. Especially toward the end. Things
might have been better if he hadn’t been able to get to the liquor store—if it was outside the circle—
but it wasn’t. And really, who can say? There is no blaming here, Jake. No condemnation.”
That was good to hear, but only because it meant we could converse about this lunatic subject like
halfway rational men. Not that his feelings mattered much to me, either way; I still had to do what I
had to do. “What’s your name?”
“Zack Lang. From Seattle, originally.”
“Seattle when?”
“It’s a question with no relevance to the current discussion.”
“It hurts you to be here, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. My own sanity won’t last much longer, if I don’t get back. And the residual effects will be
with me forever. High suicide rate among our kind, Jake. Very high. Men—and we are men, not
aliens or supernatural beings, if that’s what you were thinking—aren’t made to hold multiple realitystrings
in their heads. It’s not like using your imagination. It’s not like that at all. We have training,
of course, but you can still feel it eating into you. Like acid.”
“So every trip isn’t a complete reset.”
“Yes and no. It leaves residue. Every time your cook friend—”
“His name was Al.”
“Yes, I suppose I knew that, but my memory has started to break down. It’s like Alzheimer’s, only
it’s not Alzheimer’s. It’s because the brain can’t help trying to reconcile all those thin overlays of
reality. The strings create multiple images of the future. Some are clear, most are hazy. That’s
probably why Kyle thought your name was Jimla. He must have heard it along one of the strings.”
He didn’t hear it, I thought. He saw it on some kind of String-O-Vision. On a billboard in Texas. Maybe
even through my eyes.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, Jake. For you, time-travel is simple.”
Not all that simple, I thought.
“There were paradoxes,” I said. “All kinds of them. Weren’t there?”
“No, that’s the wrong word. It’s residue. Didn’t I just tell you that?” He honestly didn’t seem sure.
“It gums up the machine. Eventually a point will come where the machine simply . . . stops.”
I thought of how the engine had blown in the Studebaker Sadie and I had stolen.