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“What’ll we drink to?” I asked when we had our glasses in hand.
“Better times than these. Will that work for you, Mr. Epping?”
“It works fine. And make it Jake.”
We clinked. Drank. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything stronger than Lone Star
beer. The whisky was like hot honey.
“No electricity?” I asked, looking around at the lamps. He had turned them all low, presumably to
save on oil.
He made a sour face. “Not from around here, are you?”
A question I’d heard before, from Frank Anicetti, at the Fruit. On my very first trip into the past.
Then I’d told a lie. I didn’t want to do that now.
“I don’t quite know how to answer that, Harry.”
He shrugged it off. “We’re supposed to get juice three days a week, and this is supposed to be one
of the days, but it cut off around six P.M. I believe in Province Electric like I believe in Santa Claus.”
As I considered this, I remembered the stickers on the cars. “How long has Maine been a part of
Canada?”
He gave me a how-crazy-are-you look, but I could see he was enjoying this. The strangeness of it
and also the there-ness of it. I wondered when he’d last had a real conversation with someone. “Since
2005. Did someone bump you on the head, or something?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” I went to his wheelchair, dropped on the knee that still bent willingly
and without pain, and showed him the place on the back of my head where the hair had never grown
back. “I took a bad beating a few months ago—”
“Yuh, I seen you limping when you ran at those kids.”
“—and now there’s lots of things I don’t remember.”
The floor suddenly shook beneath us. The flames in the kerosene lamps trembled. The pictures on
the walls rattled, and a two-feet-high plaster Jesus with his arms outstretched took a jittery stroll
toward the edge of the mantelpiece. He looked like a guy contemplating suicide, and given the
current state of things as I had observed them, I couldn’t blame him.
“Popper,” Harry said matter-of-factly when the shaking stopped. “You remember those, right?”
“No.” I got up, went to the mantelpiece, and pushed Jesus back beside his Holy Mother.
“Thanks. I’ve already lost half the damn disciples off the shelf in my bedroom, and I mourn every
one. They were my mom’s. Poppers are earth tremors. We get a lot of em, but most of the big-daddy
quakes are in the Midwest or out California way. Europe and China too, of course.”
“People tying up their boats in Idaho, are they?” I was still at the mantelpiece, now looking at the
framed pictures.
“Hasn’t got that bad yet, but . . . you know four of the Japanese islands are gone, right?”
I looked at him with dismay. “No.”
“Three were small ones, but Hokkaido’s gone, too. Dropped into the goddam ocean four years ago
like it was on an elevator. The scientists say it’s got something to do with the earth’s crust.” Matterof-factly
he added: “They say if it don’t stop, it’ll tear the planet apart by 2080 or so. Then the solar
system’ll have two asteroid belts.”
I drank the rest of my whisky in a single gulp, and the crocodile tears of booze momentarily
doubled my vision. When the room solidified again, I pointed to a picture of Harry at about fifty. He
was still in his wheelchair, but he looked hale and healthy, at least from the waist up; the legs of his
suit pants billowed over his diminished legs. Next to him was a woman in a pink dress that reminded
me of Jackie Kennedy’s suit on 11/22/63. I remember my mother telling me never to call a woman
who wasn’t beautiful “plain-faced”; they were, she said, “good-faced.” This woman was good-faced.
“Your wife?”