“I don’t understand how you can buy meat there . . . serve it here . . . then buy it again.”

“Join the club, buddy. I just appreciate like hell that you’re still here—I could have lost you.

For that matter, you didn’t have to answer the phone when I called the school.” Part of me wished I hadn’t, but I didn’t say that. Probably I didn’t have to. He was sick, not blind.

“Come to the house tonight. I’ll tell you what I’ve got in mind, and then you can do whatever you think is best. But you’ll have to decide pretty fast, because time is short. Kind of ironic, wouldn’t you say, considering where the invisible steps in my pantry come out?” More slowly than ever, I said: “Every . . . time . . . is . . . the . . . first time.” He smiled again. “I think you’ve got that part. I’ll see you tonight, okay? Nineteen Vining Street. Look for the gnome with the flag.”

8

I left Al’s Diner at three-thirty. The six hours between then and nine-thirty weren’t as weird as visiting Lisbon Falls fifty-three years ago, but almost. Time seemed simultaneously to drag and speed by. I drove back to the house I was buying in Sabattus (Christy and I sold the one we’d owned in The Falls and split the take when our marital corporation dissolved). I thought I’d take a nap, but of course I couldn’t sleep. After twenty minutes of lying on my back, straight as a poker, and staring up at the ceiling, I went into the bathroom to take a leak. As I watched the urine splash into the bowl, I thought: That’s processed root beer from 1958. But at the same time I was thinking that was bullshit, Al had hypnotized me somehow.

That doubling thing, see?

I tried to finish reading the last of the honors essays, and wasn’t a bit surprised to find I couldn’t do it. Wield Mr. Epping’s fearsome red pen? Pass critical judgments? That was a laugh. I couldn’t even make the words connect. So I turned on the tube (throwback slang from the Nifty Fifties; televisions no longer have tubes) and channel-surfed for awhile. On TMC I came across an old movie called Dragstrip Girl. I found myself watching the old cars and angst-ridden teens so intently it was giving me a headache, and I turned it off. I made myself a stir-fry, then couldn’t eat it even though I was hungry. I sat there, looking at it on the plate, thinking about Al Templeton serving the same dozen or so pounds of hamburger over and over, year after year. It really was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and so what if catburger and dogburger rumors circulated due to his low prices? Given what he was paying for meat, he had to be making an absurd profit on every Fatburger he did sell.

When I realized I was pacing around my kitchen—unable to sleep, unable to read, unable to watch TV, a perfectly good stir-fry turned down the sink-pig—I got in my car and drove back to town. It was quarter to seven by then, and there were plenty of parking spaces on Main Street. I pulled in across from the Kennebec Fruit and sat behind the wheel, staring at a paint-peeling relic that had once been a thriving smalltown business. Closed for the day, it looked ready for the wrecking ball. The only sign of human habitation were a few Moxie signs in the dusty show window (DRINK MOXIE FOR HEALTH!, read the biggest), and they were so old-fashioned they could have been left behind for years.

The Fruit’s shadow stretched across the street to touch my car. To my right, where the liquor store had been, there was now a tidy brick building that housed a branch of Key Bank. Who needed a greenfront when you could bop into any grocery store in the state and bop back out with a pint of Jack or a quart of coffee brandy? Not in a flimsy paper bag, either; in these modern times we use plastic, son. Lasts a thousand years. And speaking of grocery stores, I had never heard of one called the Red & White. If you wanted to shop for food in The Falls, you went to the IGA a block down on 196. It was right across from the old railroad station. Which was now a combination tee-shirt shop and tattoo parlor.

All the same, the past felt very close just then—maybe it was just the golden cast of the declining summer light, which has always struck me as slightly supernatural. It was as if 1958 were still right here, only hidden beneath a flimsy film of intervening years. And, if I hadn’t imagined what had happened to me this afternoon, that was true.

He wants me to do something. Something he would have done himself, but the cancer stopped him. He said he went back and stayed for four years (at least I thought that was what he’d said), but four years wasn’t long enough.

Was I willing to go back down those stairs and stay for four-plus years? Basically take up residence? Come back two minutes later . . . only in my forties, with strands of gray starting to show up in my hair? I couldn’t imagine doing that, but I couldn’t imagine what Al had found so important back there in the first place. The one thing I did know was that four or six or eight years of my life was too much to ask, even for a dying man.

I still had over two hours before I was scheduled to show up at Al’s. I decided I’d go back home, make myself another meal, and this time force myself to eat it. After that, I’d take another shot at finishing my honors essays. I might be one of the very few people who had ever traveled back in time—for that matter, Al and I might be the only ones who had ever done it in the history of the world—but my poetry students were still going to want their final grades.

I hadn’t had the radio on when I drove to town, but I turned it on now. Like my TV, it gets its programming from computer-driven space voyagers that go whirling around the earth at a height of twenty-two thousand miles, an idea that surely would have been greeted with wide-eyed wonder (but probably not outright disbelief) by the teenager Frank Anicetti had been back in the day. I tuned to the Sixties on Six and caught Danny & the Juniors working out on “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”—three or four urgent, harmonic voices singing over a jackhammer piano. They were followed by Little Richard screaming “Lucille” at the top of his lungs, and then Ernie K-Doe more or less moaning “Mother-in-Law”: She thinks her advice is a contribution, but if she would leave that would be the solution. It all sounded as fresh and sweet as the oranges Mrs. Symonds and her friends had been picking over that early afternoon.

It sounded new.

Did I want to spend years in the past? No. But I did want to go back. If only to hear how Little Richard sounded when he was still top of the pops. Or get on a Trans World Airlines plane without having to take off my shoes, submit to a full-body scan, and go through a metal detector.

And I wanted another root beer.

CHAPTER 3

1

The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine flag with the moose on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top one white and the bottom one red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as I went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street, thinking about an amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from Texas.” The door opened before I could ring the bell. Al was wearing a bathrobe over pajamas, and his newly white hair was in corkscrew tangles—a serious case of bedhead if I’d ever seen one. But the sleep (and the painkillers, of course) had done him some good. He still looked sick, but the lines around his mouth weren’t so deep and his gait, as he led me down the short stub of a hall and into his living room, seemed surer. He was no longer pressing his right hand into his left armpit, as if trying to hold himself together.