What to make of PRESIDENT AGNEW SUPPORTS NASA TERRAFORM DREAM? What to make of the item at the bottom, written in Cyrillic ?
What has happened to me? Callahan asks himself. All through the business of the vampires and the walking dead— even through the appearance of lost-pet posters which clearly refer to him— he has never questioned his sanity. Now, standing on the New Jersey end of this humble (and most remarkable!) footbridge across the Hudson— this footbridge which is being utilized by no one except himself— he finally does. The idea of Spiro Agnew as President is enough all by itself, he thinks, to make anyone with a speck of political sense doubt his sanity. The man resigned in disgrace years ago, even before his boss did.
What has happened to me? he wonders, but if he’s a raving lunatic imagining all of this, he really doesn’t want to know.
” Bombs away,” he says, and tosses the four-page remnant of the Leabrook Register over the railing of the bridge. The breeze catches it and carries it away toward the George Washington. That’s reality, he thinks, right over there. Those cars, those trucks, those Peter Pan charter buses. But then, among them, he sees a red vehicle that appears to be speeding along on a number of circular treads. Above the vehicle’s body— it’s about as long as a medium-sized schoolbus— a crimson cylinder is turning. BANDY, it says on one side.
BROOKS, it says on the other. BANDY BROOKS. Or BANDYBROOKS. What the hell’s Bandy Brooks? He has no idea. Nor has he ever seen such a vehicle in his life, and would not have believed such a thing— look at the treads, for heaven’s sake— would have been allowed on a public highway.
So the George Washington Bridge isn’t the safe world, either. Or not anymore.
Callahan grabs the railing of the footbridge and squeezes down tightly as a wave of dizziness courses through him, making him feel unsteady on his feet and unsure of his balance. The railing feels real enough, wood warmed by the sun and engraved with thousands of interlocking initials and messages. He sees DK L
MB in a heart. He sees FREDDY & HELENA = TRU LUV. He sees KILL ALL SPIX and NIGERS, the message flanked by swastikas, and wonders at verbal depletion so complete the sufferer cannot even spell his
favorite epithets. Messages of hate, messages of love, and all of them as real as the rapid beating of his heart or the weight of the few coins and bills in the right front pocket of his jeans. He takes a deep breath of the breeze, and that’s real, too, right down to the tang of diesel fuel.
This is happening to me, I know it is, he thinks. I am not in some psychiatric hospital’s Ward 9. I am me, I am here, and I’m even sober—at least for the time being—and New York is at my back. So is the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, with its uneasy dead. Before me is the weight of America, with all its possibilities.
This thought lifts him, and is followed by one that lifts him even higher: not just one America, perhaps, but a dozen… or a thousand… or a million. If that’s Leabrook over there instead of Fort Lee, maybe there’s another version of New Jersey where the town on the other side of the Hudson is Leeman or Leighman or Lee Bluffs or Lee Palisades or Leghorn Village. Maybe instead of forty-two continental United States on the other side of the Hudson, there are forty-two hundred, or forty-two thousand, all of them stacked in vertical geographies of chance.
And he understands instinctively that this is almost certainly true. He has stumbled upon a great, possibly endless, confluence of worlds.
They are all America, but they are all different. There are highways which lead through them, and he can see them.
He walks rapidly to the Leabrook end of the footbridge, then pauses again. Suppose I can’t find my way back? he thinks. Suppose I get lost and wander and never find my way back to the America where Fort Lee is on the west side of the George Washington Bridge and Gerald Ford (of all people!) is the President of the United States?
And then he thinks: So what if I do? So fucking what?
When he steps off on the Jersey side of the footbridge he’s grinning, truly lighthearted for this first time since the day he presided over Danny Glick’s grave in the town of Jerusalem’s Lot. A couple of boys with fishing poles are walking toward him. “Would one of you young fellows care to welcome me to New Jersey ? ”
Callahan asks, grinning more widely than ever.
“Welcome to En Jay, man,” one of them says, willingly enough, but both of them give Callahan a wide berth and a careful look. He doesn’t blame them, but it doesn’t cut into his splendid mood in the slightest. He feels like a man who has been let out of a gray and cheerless prison on a sunny day. He begins to walk faster, not turning around to give the skyline of Manhattan a single goodbye glance. Why would he? Manhattan is the past. The multiple Americas which lie ahead of him, those are the future.
He is in Leabrook. There are no chimes. Later there will be chimes and vampires; later there will be more messages chalked on sidewalks and sprayed on brick walls (not all about him, either). Later he will see the low men in their outrageous red Cadillacs and green Lincolns and purple Mercedes-Benz sedans, low men with red flashgun eyes, but not today. Today there is sunshine in a new America on the west side of a restored footbridge across the Hudson.
On Main Street he stops in front of the Leabrook Homestyle Diner and there is a sign in the window reading SHORT-ORDER COOK WANTED. Don Callahan short-ordered through most of his time at seminary and did more than his share of the same at Home on the East Side of Manhattan. He thinks he might fit right in here at the Leabrook Homestyle. Turns out he’s right, although it takes three shifts before the ability to crack a pair of eggs one-handed onto the grill comes swimming back to him. The owner, a long drink of water named Dicky Rudebacher, asks Callahan if he has any medical problems— ” catching stuff,” he calls it— and nods simple acceptance when Callahan says he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask Callahan for any paperwork, not so much as a Social Security number. He wants to pay his new short-order off the books, if that ‘snot a problem.
Callahan assures him it is not.
“One more thing,” says Dicky Rudebacher, and Callahan waits for the shoe to drop. Nothing would surprise him, but all Rudebacher says is: “You look like a drinking man.”
Callahan allows as how he has been known to take a drink.
“So have I,” Rudebacher says. “In this business it’s the way you protect your gahdam sanity. I ain’t gonna smell your breath when you come in… if you come in on time. Miss coming in on time twice, though, and you’re on your way to wherever. I ain’t going to tell you that again.”
Callahan short-orders at the Leabrook Homestyle Diner for three weeks, and stays two blocks down at the Sunset Motel. Only it’s not always the Homestyle, and it’s not always the Sunset. On his fourth day in town, he wakes up in the Sunrise Motel, and the Leabrook Homestyle Diner is the Fort Lee Homestyle Diner. The Leabook Register which people have been leaving behind on the counter becomes the Fort Lee Register-American. He is not exactly relieved to discover Gerald Ford has reassumed the Presidency.
When Rudebacher pays him at the end of his first week— in Fort Lee— Grant is on the fifties, Jackson is on the twenties, and Alexander Hamilton is on the single ten in the envelope the boss hands him. At the end of the second week— in Leabrook— Abraham Lincoln is on the fifties and someone named Chadbourne is on the ten. It’s still Andrew Jackson on the twenties, which is something of a relief. In Callahan’s motel room, the bedcover is pink in Leabrook and orange in Fort Lee. This is handy. He always knows which version of New Jersey he’s in as soon as he wakes up.
Twice he gets drunk. The second time, after closing, Dicky Rudebacher joins him and matches him drink for drink. “This used to be a great country,” the Leabrook version of Rudebacher mourns, and Callahan thinks how great it is that some things don’t change; the fundamental bitch-and-moans apply as time goes by.
But his shadow starts getting longer earlier each day, he has seen his first Type Three vampire waiting in line to buy a ticket at the Leabrook Twin Cinema, and one day he gives notice.