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Final Notes
9/30/58
I holed up in Unit 7 at the Tamarack Motor Court.
I paid with money from an ostrich wallet that was given to me by an old buddy. Money, like meat
bought at the Red & White Supermarket and shirts bought at Mason’s Menswear, stays. If every trip
really is a complete reset, those things shouldn’t, but it’s not and they do. The money wasn’t from Al,
but at least Agent Hosty let me run, which might turn out to be a good thing for the world.
Or not. I don’t know.
Tomorrow will be the first of October. In Derry, the Dunning kids are looking forward to
Halloween and already planning their costumes. Ellen, that little red-haired kut-up kutie, plans to go
as Princess Summerfall Winterspring. She’ll never get the chance. If I went to Derry today, I could
kill Frank Dunning and save her Halloween, but I won’t. And I won’t go to Durham to save Carolyn
Poulin from Andy Cullum’s errant shot. The question is, will I go to Jodie? I can’t save Kennedy, that
is out of the question, but can the future history of the world be so fragile that it will not allow two
high school teachers to meet and fall in love? To marry, to dance to Beatles tunes like “I Want to
Hold Your Hand,” and live unremarkable lives?
I don’t know, I don’t know.
She might not want to have anything to do with me. We’re no longer going to be thirty-five and
twenty-eight; this time I’d be forty-two or-three. I look even older. But I believe in love, you know;
love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to
blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.
Sadie dancing the Madison, color high in her cheeks, laughing.
Sadie telling me to lick her mouth again.
Sadie asking if I’d like to come in and have poundcake.
One man and one woman. Is that too much to ask?
I don’t know, I don’t know.
What have I done here, you ask, now that I have laid my good-angel wings aside? I have written. I
have a fountain pen—one given to me by Mike and Bobbi Jill, you remember them—and I walked up
the road to a market, where I bought ten refills. The ink is black, which suits my mood. I also bought
two dozen thick legal pads, and I have filled all but the last one. Near the market is a Western Auto
store, where I bought a spade and a steel footlocker, the kind with a combination. The total cost of my
purchases was seventeen dollars and nineteen cents. Are these items enough to turn the world dark and
filthy? What will happen to the clerk, whose ordained course has been changed—just by our brief
transaction—from what it would have been otherwise?
I don’t know, but I do know this: I once gave a high school football player the chance to shine as an
actor, and his girlfriend was disfigured. You could say I wasn’t responsible, but we know better, don’t
we? The butterfly spreads its wings.
For three weeks I wrote all day, every day. Twelve hours on some days. Fourteen on others. The pen
racing and racing. My hand got sore. I soaked it, then wrote some more. Some nights I went to the
Lisbon Drive-In, where there’s a special price for walk-ins: thirty cents. I sat in one of the folding
chairs in front of the snackbar and next to the kiddie playground. I watched The Long, Hot Summer
again. I watched The Bridge on the River Kwai and South Pacific. I watched a HORRORIFFIC DOUBLE
FEATURE consisting of The Fly and The Blob. And I wondered what I was changing. If I so much as
slapped a bug, I wondered what I was changing ten years up the line. Or twenty. Or forty.
I don’t know, I don’t know.