A minute ago, down on B-6, just as we had loaded Bobby’s corpse into the
elevator, someone up here had pushed the call button. That someone was
Bobby, a living Bobby from earlier in the night.
In this strangely afflicted building, time past, time present, and time
future were all present here at once.
With my friend sand I myself gaping at me in astonishment, as if I were a
ghost, I turned right, toward the two oncoming security men that the
others hadn’t yet seen. One of these guards had fired the shot that
killed Bobby.
I squeezed off a burst from the Uzi, and both guards were cut down
before they fired a shot.
My stomach twisted with revulsion at what I’d done, and I tried to
escape my conscience by taking refuge in the fact that these men would
have been killed by Doogie, anyway, after they had shot Bobby.
I had only accelerated their fate while changing Bobby’s altogether, for
a net saving of one life. But perhaps excuses of that sort make
excellent paving stones for the road to Hell.
Behind me, Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt rushed into the corridor from
the elevator.
The astonishment among all these doppelgangers was as thick as the
peanut butter on the banana sandwiches that had ultimately killed Elvis.
I didn’t understand how this could be happening, because it had not
happened earlier. We had never met ourselves in this hallway on our way
down to find the children. But if we were meeting ourselves now, why
didn’t I have a memory of it?
Paradox. Time paradox, I guess. You know me and math, me and physics.
I’m more a Pooh guy, an Eliot guy. My head ached. I had changed Bobby
Halloway’s fate, which was, to me, a pure miracle, not mere mathematics.
The elevator was full of muddy red light and the blurry maroon figures
of the kids. The doors began to slide shut.
“Hold it! ” I shouted.
Present-time Doogie blocked the door, half in the fluorescent corridor
and half in the murky red elevator.
The throbbing electronic sound swelled louder. It was fearsome.
I remembered John Joseph Randolph’s pleasurable anticipation, his
confidence that we would all be going to the other side soon, to that
sideways place he wouldn’t name. The train, he’d said, was already
beginning to pull out of the station. Suddenly I wondered if he’d meant
the whole building might make that mysterious journey not just whoever
was in the egg room, but everyone within the walls of the hangar and the
six basements below it.
With a renewed sense of urgency, I asked Doogie to look in the elevator
and see if Bobby was there.
“I’m here, ” said the Bobby in the hall.
“In there, you’re a pile of dead meat, ” I told him.
“No way.”
“Way.”
“Ouch.”
“Maximum.” I didn’t know why, but I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea
to return upstairs to the hangar, beyond this zone of radically tangled
time, with both Bobbys, the live one and the dead one.
Still holding the door, present-time Doogie stepped into the elevator,
hesitated, then returned to the corridor. “There’s no Bobby in there!”
“Where’d he go? ” asked present-time Sasha.
“The kids say he just … went. They’re jazzed about it.”
“The body’s gone because he wasn’t shot here, after all, ” I explained,
which was about as illuminating as describing a thermonuclear reaction
with the words it go boom.
“You said I was dead meat, ” the past-time Bobby said.
“What’s happening here? ” the past-time Doogie demanded.
“Paradox, ” I said.
“What’s that mean? ”
“I read poetry, ” I said with super-mondo frustration.
“Good work, son, ” said both Roosevelts in perfect harmony, and then
looked at each other in surprise.
To Bobby, I said, “Get in the elevator.”
“Where are we going? ” he asked.
“Out.”
“What about the kids? ”
“We got them.”
“What about Orson?”
“He’s in the elevator.”
“Cool.”
“Will you move your ass? ” I demanded.
“A little crabby, aren’t we? ” he said, stepping forward, patting my
shoulder.
“You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
“Wasn’t I the one who died?