“Henry?” he had asked. “We made plans to go see Duddits, didn’t we? We were going on St Patrick’s Day. I don’t remember it, but it’s written on my office calendar.”
“Yeah,” Henry had replied. “As a matter of fact, we did.”
“So much for the luck of the Irish, huh?”
As a result of such memories, Jonesy was positive March fifteenth had already happened. There were all sorts of evidence supporting the thesis, his office calendar being Exhibit A. Yet here they were again, those troublesome Ides… and now, oh goddam, how was this for unfair, now there seemed to be more of the fifteenth than ever.
Previously, his memory of that day faded out at around ten A.M. He’d been in his office, drinking coffee and making a stack of books to take down to the History Department office, where there was a FREE WITH STUDENT ID table. He hadn’t been happy, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember why. According to the same office calendar on which he had spied the unkept March seventeenth appointment to go see Duddits, he’d had a March fifteenth appointment with a student named David Defuniak. Jonesy couldn’t remember what it had been about, but he later found a notation from one of his grad assistants about a make-up essay from Defuniak-short-term results of the Norman Conquest-so he supposed it had been that. Still, what was there in a make-up assignment that could possibly have made Associate Professor Gary Jones feel unhappy?
Unhappy or not, he had been humming something, humming and then scatting the words, which were close to nonsense: Yes we can, yes we can-can, great gosh a’mighty yes we can-can. There were a few little shreds after that-wishing Colleen, the Department secretary, a nice St Paddy’s Day, grabbing a Boston Phoenix from the newspaper box outside the building, dropping a quarter into the saxophone case of a skinhead just over the bridge on the Cambridge side, feeling sorry for the guy because he was wearing a light sweater and the wind coming off the Charles was sharp-but mostly what he remembered after making that stack of giveaway books was darkness. Consciousness had returned in the hospital, with that droning voice from a nearby room: Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy, I want Marcy. Or maybe it had been where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy. Old creeping death. Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him-sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very seams-and now old creeping death was trying to find him again. Trying to trick him. Trying to make him give himself away.
This time around, though, all that merciful darkness in the middle is gone. This time around he not only wishes Colleen a happy St. Paddy’s Day, he tells her a joke: What do you call a Jamaican proctologist? A Pokemon. He goes out, his future self-his November self-riding in his March head like a stowaway. His future self hears his March self think foat a beautiful day it turned out to be as he starts walking towards his appointment with destiny in Cambridge. He tries to tell his March self that this is a bad idea, a grotesquely bad idea, that he can save himself months of agony just by hailing a Red Top or taking the T, but he can’t get through. Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time when he was a teenager had it right: you can’t change the past, no matter how you try.
He walks across the bridge, and although the wind is a little cold, he still enjoys the sun on his face and the way it breaks into a million bright splinters on the Charles. He sings a snatch of “Here Comes the Sun,” then reverts to the Pointer Sisters: Yes we cancan, great gosh a’mighty. Swinging his briefcase in rhythm. His sandwich is inside. Egg salad. Mmm-mmmm, Henry said. SSDD, Henry said.
Here is the saxophonist, and surprise: he’s not on the end of the Mass Ave Bridge but farther up, by the MIT campus, outside one of those funky little Indian restaurants. He’s shivering in the cold, bald, with nicks on his scalp suggesting he wasn’t cut out to be a barber. The way he’s playing “These Foolish Things” suggests he wasn’t cut out to be a horn-player, either, and Jonesy wants to tell him to be a carpenter, an actor, a terrorist, anything but a musician. Instead, Jonesy actually encourages him, not dropping the quarter he previously remembered into the guy’s case (it’s lined with scuffed purple velvet), but a whole fistful of change-these foolish things, indeed. He blames it on the first warm sun after a long cold winter; he blames it on how well things turned out with Defuniak.
The sax-man rolls his eyes to Jonesy, thanking him but still blowing, Jonesy thinks of another joke: What do you call a sax-player with a credit card? An optimist.
He walks on, swinging his case, not listening to the Jonesy inside, the one who has swum upstream from November like some time-travelling salmon. “Hey Jonesy, stop. Just a few seconds should be enough. Tie your shoe or something. (No good, he’s wearing loafers. Soon he will be wearing a cast, as well.) That intersection up there is where it happens, the one where the Red Line stops, Mass Ave and Prospect. There’s an old guy coming, a wonked-out history professor in a dark blue Lincoln Town Car and he’s going to clean you like a house.”
But it’s no good. No matter how hard he yells, it’s no good. The phone lines are down. You can’t go back, can’t kill your own grandfather, can’t shoot Lee Harvey Oswald as he kneels at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, congealing fried chicken on a paper plate beside him and his mail-order rifle aimed, can’t stop yourself walking across the intersection of Mass Ave and Prospect Street with your briefcase in your hand and your copy of the Boston Phoenix-which you will never read-under your arm. Sorry, sir, the lines are down somewhere in the Jefferson Tract, it’s a real fuckarow up there, your call cannot go through-
And then, oh God, this is new-the message does go through! As he reaches the corner, as he stands there on the curb, just about to step down into the crosswalk, it does go through!
“What?” he says, and the man who was stopped beside him, the first one to bend over him in a past which now may be blessedly canceled, looks at him suspiciously and says “I didn’t say anything,” as though there might be a third with them. Jonesy barely hears him because there is a third, there is a voice inside him, one which sounds suspiciously like his own, and it’s screaming at him to stay on the curb, to stay out of the street-
Then he hears someone crying. He looks across to the far side of Prospect and oh God, Duddits is there, Duddits Cavell naked except for his Underoos, and there is brown stuff smeared all around his mouth. It looks like chocolate, but Jonesy knows better. It’s dogshit, that bastard Richie made him eat it after all, and people over there are walking back and forth regardless, ignoring him, as if Duddits wasn’t there.
“Duddits!” Jonesy calls. “Duddits, hang on, man, I’m coming!”
And he plunges into the street without looking, the passenger inside helpless to do anything but ride along, understanding at last that this was exactly how and why the accident happened-the old man, yes, the old man with early-stage Alzheimer’s who had no business behind the wheel of a car in the first place, but that had only been part of it. The other part, concealed in the blackness surrounding the crash until now, was this: he had seen Duddits and had simply bolted, forgetting to look.
He glimpses something more, as well: some huge pattern, something like a dreamcatcher that binds all the years since they first met Duddits Cavell in 1978, something that binds the future as well.
Sunlight twinkles on a windshield; he sees this in the comer of his left eye. A car coming, and too fast. The man who was beside him on the curb, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, cries out: “Watch it, guy, watch it!” but Jonesy barely hears him. Because there is a deer on the sidewalk behind Duddits, a fine big buck, almost as big as a man. Then, just before the Town Car strikes him, Jonesy sees the deer is a man, a man in an orange cap and an orange flagman’s vest. On his shoulder, like a hideous mascot, is a legless weasel-thing with enormous black eyes. Its tail-or maybe it’s a tentacle-is curled around the man’s neck. How in God’s name could I have thought he was a deer? Jonesy thinks, and then the Lincoln strikes him and he is knocked into the street. He hears a bitter, muffled snap as his hip breaks.