The great civil rights reforms of the sixties never happened. Kennedy was no LBJ, and as vice president, Johnson was uniquely powerless to help him. The Republicans and Dixiecrats filibustered for a hundred and ten days; one actually died on the floor and became a right-wing hero.

When Kennedy finally gave up, he made an off-the-cuff remark that would haunt him until he died in 1983: “White America has filled its house with kindling; now it will burn.” The race riots came next. While Kennedy was preoccupied with them, the North Vietnamese armies overran Saigon—and the man who’d gotten me into this was paralyzed in a helicopter crash on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Public opinion began to swing heavily against JFK.

A month after the fall of Saigon, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Chicago. The assassin turned out to be a rogue FBI agent named Dwight Holly. Before being killed himself, he claimed to have carried out the hit on Hoover’s orders. Chicago went up in flames. So did a dozen other American cities.

George Wallace was elected president. By then the earthquakes had begun in earnest.

Wallace couldn’t do anything about those, so he settled for firebombing Chicago into submission.

That, Harry said, was in June of 1969. A year later, President Wallace offered Ho Chi Minh an ultimatum: make Saigon a free city like Berlin or see Hanoi become a dead one, like Hiroshima.

Uncle Ho refused. If he thought Wallace was bluffing, he was wrong. Hanoi became a radioactive cloud on August ninth, 1969, twenty-four years to the day after Harry Truman dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Vice President Curtis LeMay took personal charge of the mission. In a speech to the nation, Wallace called it God’s will. Most Americans concurred. Wallace’s approval ratings were high, but there was at least one fellow who did not approve. His name was Arthur Bremer, and on May fifteenth, 1972, he shot Wallace dead as Wallace campaigned for reelection at a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland.

“With what kind of gun?”

“I believe it was a .38 revolver.”

Sure it was. Maybe a Police Special, but probably a Victory model, the same kind of gun that had taken Officer Tippit’s life along another time-string.

This was where I began to lose the thread. Where the thought I have to put this right, put this right, put this right began to hammer in my head like a gong.

Hubert Humphrey became president in ’72. The earthquakes worsened. The world suicide rate skyrocketed. Fundamentalism of all kinds blossomed. The terrorism fomented by religious extremists blossomed with it. India and Pakistan went to war; more mushroom clouds bloomed.

Bombay never became Mumbai. What it became was radioactive ash in a cancer-wind.

Likewise, Karachi. Only when Russia, China, and the United States promised to bomb both countries back to the Stone Age did the hostilities cease.

In 1976, Humphrey lost to Ronald Reagan in a coast-to-coast landslide; The Hump couldn’t hold even his native state of Minnesota.

Two thousand committed mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.

In November of 1979, Iranian students overran the American embassy in Tehran and took not sixty-six hostages but over two hundred. Heads rolled on Iranian TV. Reagan had learned enough from Hanoi Hell to keep the nukes in their bomb bays and missile silos, but he sent in beaucoup troops. The remaining hostages were, of course, slaughtered, and an emerging terrorist group calling themselves The Base—or, in Arabic, Al-Qaeda—began planting roadside bombs here, there, and everywhere.

“The man could speechify like a motherfucker, but he had no understanding of militant Islam,” Harry said.

The Beatles reunited and played a Peace Concert. A suicide bomber in the crowd detonated his vest and killed three hundred spectators. Paul McCartney was blinded.

The Mideast went up in flames shortly thereafter.

Russia collapsed.

Some group—probably exiled Russian hard-line fanatics—began selling nuclear weapons to terrorist groups, including The Base.

“By 1994,” Harry said in his dry voice, “the oil fields over there were so much black glass.

The kind that glows in the dark. Since then, though, the terrorism has kind of burned itself out.

Someone blew up a suitcase nuke in Miami two years ago, but it didn’t work very well. I mean, it’ll be sixty or eighty years before anybody can party on South Beach—and of course the Gulf of Mexico is basically dead soup—but only ten thousand people have died of radiation poisoning. By then it wasn’t our problem. Maine voted to become a part of Canada, and President Clinton was happy to say good riddance.”

“Bill Clinton’s president?”

“Gosh, no. He was a shoo-in for the ’04 nomination, but he died of a heart attack at the convention. His wife stepped in. She’s president.”

“Doing a good job?”

Harry waggled his hand. “Not bad . . . but you can’t legislate earthquakes. And that’s what’s going to do for us, in the end.”

Overhead, that watery ripping sound came again. I looked up. Harry didn’t.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Son,” he said, “nobody seems to know. The scientists argue, but in this case I think the preachers might have the straight of it. They say it’s God getting ready to tear down all the works of His hands, same way that Samson tore down the Temple of the Philistines.” He drank the rest of his whisky. Thin color had bloomed in his cheeks . . . which were, as far as I could see, free of radiation sores. “And on that one, I think they might be right.”

“Christ almighty,” I said.

He looked at me levelly. “Heard enough history, son?”

Enough to last me a lifetime.

4

“I have to go,” I said. “Will you be all right?”

“Until I’m not. Same as everyone else.” He looked at me closely. “Jake, where did you drop from? And why the hell should I feel like I know you?”

“Maybe because we always know our good angels?”

“Bullshit.”

I wanted to be gone. All in all, I thought my life after the next reset was going to be much simpler. But first, because this was a good man who had suffered greatly in all three of his incarnations, I approached the mantelpiece again, and took down one of the framed pictures.

“Be careful with that,” Harry said tetchily. “It’s my family.”

“I know.” I put it in his gnarled and age-spotted hands, a black-and-white photo that had, by the faintly fuzzy look of the image, been blown up from a Kodak snap. “Did your dad take this? I ask, because he’s the only one not in it.”

He looked at me curiously, then back down at the picture. “No,” he said. “This was taken by a neighbor-lady in the summer of 1958. My dad and mom were separated by then.” I wondered if the neighbor-lady had been the one I’d seen smoking a cigarette as she alternated washing the family car and spraying the family dog. Somehow I was sure it had been.