"Do you know your name?" the woman asked.
"Puddentane," I said. "Ask me again and I"ll tell you the same."
Mr. Jake George Puddentane Epping-Amberson spent seven weeks in Parkland before being moved to a rehab center-a little housing complex for sick people-on the north side of Dallas. During those seven weeks I was on IV antibiotics for the infection that had set up shop where my spleen used to be. The splint on my broken arm was replaced with a long cast, which also filled up with names I didn"t know. Shortly before moving to Eden Fallows, the rehab center, I graduated to a short cast on my arm. Around that same time, a physical therapist began to torture my knee back to something resembling mobility. I was told I screamed a lot, but I don"t remember.
Malcolm Perry and the rest of the Parkland staff saved my life, I have no doubt about that. They also gave me an unintended and unwelcome gift that lasted well into my time at Eden Fallows. This was a secondary infection caused by the antibiotics being pumped into my system to beat the primary one. I have hazy memories of vomiting and of spending what seemed like whole days with my a.s.s on a bedpan. I remember thinking at one point I have to go to the Derry Drug and see Mr. Keene. I need Kaopectate. But who was Mr. Keene, and where was Derry?
They let me out of the hospital when I began to hold food down again, but I"d been at Eden Fallows almost two weeks before the diarrhea stopped. By then it was nearing the end of October. Sadie (usually I remembered her name; sometimes it slipped my mind) brought me a paper jack-o"-lantern. This memory is very clear, because I screamed when I saw it. They were the screams of someone who has forgotten something vitally important.
"What?" she asked me. "What is it, honey? What"s wrong? Is it Kennedy? Something about Kennedy?"
"He"s going to kill them all with a hammer!" I shouted at her. "On Halloween night! I have to stop him!"
"Who?" She took my waving hands, her face frightened. "Stop who?"
But I couldn"t remember, and I fell asleep. I slept a lot, and not just because of the slowly healing head injury. I was exhausted, little more than a ghost of my former self. On the day of the beating, I had weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds. By the time I was released from the hospital and installed in Eden Fallows, I weighed a hundred and thirty-eight.
That was the outside life of Jake Epping, a man who had been beaten badly, then nearly died in the hospital. My inside life was blackness, voices, and flashes of understanding that were like lightning: they blinded me with their brilliance and were gone again before I could get more than glimpses of the landscape by their light. I was mostly lost, but every now and then I found myself.
Found myself h.e.l.lishly hot, and a woman was feeding me ice chips that tasted heavenly cool. This was THE WOMAN WITH THE SCAR, who was sometimes Sadie.
Found myself on the commode in the corner of the room with no idea how I"d gotten there, unloosing what felt like gallons of watery burning s.h.i.t, my side itching and throbbing, my knee bellowing. I remember wishing someone would kill me.
Found myself trying to get out of bed, because I had to do something terribly important. It seemed to me that the whole world was depending on me to do this thing. THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was there. He caught me and helped me back into bed before I fell on the floor. "Not yet, son," he said. "You"re nowhere near strong enough."
Found myself talking-or trying to talk-to a pair of uniformed policemen who had come to ask questions about the beating I"d taken. One of them had a name tag that said TIPPIT. I tried to tell him he was in danger. I tried to tell him to remember the fifth of November. It was the right month but the wrong day. I couldn"t remember the actual date and began to thump at my stupid head in frustration. The cops looked at each other, puzzled. NOT-TIPPIT called for a nurse. The nurse came with a doctor, the doctor gave me a shot, and I floated away.
Found myself listening to Sadie as she read to me, first Jude the Obscure, then Tess of the D"Urbervilles. I knew those stories, and listening to them again was comforting. At one point during Tess, I remembered something.
"I made Tessica Caltrop leave us alone."
Sadie looked up. "Do you mean Jessica? Jessica Caltrop? You did? How? Do you remember?"
But I didn"t. It was gone.
Found myself looking at Sadie as she stood at my little window, staring out at the rain and crying.
But mostly I was lost.
THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was Deke, but once I thought he was my grandfather, and that scared me very badly, because Grampy Epping was dead, and- Epping, that was my name. Hold onto it, I told myself, but at first I couldn"t.
Several times AN ELDERLY WOMAN WITH RED LIPSTICK came to see me. Sometimes I thought her name was Miz Mimi; sometimes I thought it was Miz Ellie; once I was quite sure she was Irene Ryan, who played Granny Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. I told her that I"d thrown my cell phone into a pond. "Now it sleeps with the fishes. I sure wish I had that sucker back."
A YOUNG COUPLE came. Sadie said, "Look, it"s Mike and Bobbi Jill."
I said, "Mike Coleslaw."
THE YOUNG MAN said, "That"s close, Mr. A." He smiled. A tear ran down his cheek when he did.
Later, when Sadie and Deke came to Eden Fallows, they would sit with me on the couch. Sadie would take my hand and ask, "What"s his name, Jake? You never told me his name. How can we stop him if we don"t know who he is or where he is going to be?"
I said, "I"m going to flop him." I tried very hard. It made the back of my head hurt, but I tried even harder. "Stop him."
"You couldn"t stop a cinchbug without our help," Deke said.
But Sadie was too dear and Deke was too old. She shouldn"t have told him in the first place. Maybe that was all right, though, because he didn"t really believe it.
"The Yellow Card Man will stop you if you get involved," I said. "I"m the only one he can"t stop."
"Who is the Yellow Card Man?" Sadie asked, leaning forward and taking my hands.
"I don"t remember, but he can"t stop me because I don"t belong here."
Only he was stopping me. Or something was. Dr. Perry said my amnesia was shallow and transient, and he was right . . . but only up to a point. If I tried too hard to remember the things that mattered most, my head ached fiercely, my limping walk became a stumble, and my vision blurred. Worst of all was the tendency to suddenly fall asleep. Sadie asked Dr. Perry if it was narcolepsy. He said probably not, but I thought he looked worried.
"Does he wake when you call him or shake him?"
"Always," Sadie said.
"Is it more likely to happen when he"s upset because he can"t remember something?"
Sadie agreed that it was.
"Then I"m quite sure it will pa.s.s, the way his amnesia is pa.s.sing."
At last-little by slowly-my inside world began to merge with the outside one. I was Jacob Epping, I was a teacher, and I had somehow traveled back in time to stop the a.s.sa.s.sination of President Kennedy. I tried to reject the idea at first, but I knew too much about the intervening years, and those things weren"t visions. They were memories. The Rolling Stones, the Clinton impeachment hearings, the World Trade Center in flames. Christy, my troubled and troublesome ex-wife.
One night while Sadie and I were watching Combat, I remembered what I had done to Frank Dunning.
"Sadie, I killed a man before I came to Texas. It was in a graveyard. I had to. He was going to murder his whole family."
She looked at me, eyes wide and mouth open.
"Turn off the TV," I said. "The guy who plays Sergeant Saunders-can"t remember his name-is going to be decapitated by a helicopter blade. Please, Sadie, turn it off."
She did, then knelt before me.
"Who"s going to kill Kennedy? Where is he going to be when he does it?"
I tried my hardest, and I didn"t fall asleep, but I couldn"t remember. I had gone from Maine to Florida, I remembered that. In the Ford Sunliner, a great car. I had gone from Florida to New Orleans, and when I left New Orleans, I"d come to Texas. I remembered listening to "Earth Angel" on the radio as I crossed the state line, doing seventy miles per hour on Highway 20. I remembered a sign: TEXAS WELCOMES YOU. And a billboard advertising SONNY"S B-B-Q, 27 MI. After that, a hole in the film. On the other side were emerging memories of teaching and living in Jodie. Brighter memories of swing-dancing with Sadie and lying in bed with her at the Candlewood Bungalows. Sadie told me I"d also lived in Fort Worth and Dallas, but she didn"t know where; all she had were two phone numbers that no longer worked. I didn"t know where, either, although I thought one of the places might have been on Cadillac Street. She checked roadmaps and said there was no Cadillac Street in either city.
I could remember a lot of things now, but not the a.s.sa.s.sin"s name, or where he was going to be when he made his try. And why not? Because the past was keeping it from me. The obdurate past.
"The a.s.sa.s.sin has a child," I said. "I think her name is April."
"Jake, I"m going to ask you something. It might make you mad, but since a lot depends on this-the fate of the world, according to you-I need to."
"Go ahead." I couldn"t think of anything she might ask that would make me angry.
"Are you lying to me?"
"No," I said. It was true. Then.
"I told Deke we needed to call the police. He showed me a piece in the Morning News that said there have already been two hundred death threats and tips about potential a.s.sa.s.sins. He says both the right-wingers from DallasFort Worth and the left-wingers from San Antonio are trying to scare Kennedy out of Texas. He says the Dallas police are turning all the threats and tips over to the FBI and they"re doing nothing. He says the only person J. Edgar Hoover hates more than JFK is his brother Bobby."
I didn"t much care who J. Edgar Hoover hated. "Do you believe me?"
"Yes," she said, and sighed. "Is Vic Morrow really going to die?"
That was his name, sure. "He is."
"Making Combat?"
"No, a movie."
She burst into tears. "Don"t you die, Jake-please. I only want you to get better."
I had a lot of bad dreams. The locations varied-sometimes it was an empty street that looked like Main Street in Lisbon Falls, sometimes it was the graveyard where I"d shot Frank Dunning, sometimes it was the kitchen of Andy Cullum, the cribbage ace-but usually it was Al Templeton"s diner. We sat in a booth with the photos on his Town Wall of Celebrity looking down at us. Al was sick-dying-but his eyes were full of bright intensity.
"The Yellow Card Man"s the personification of the obdurate past," Al said. "You know that, don"t you?"
Yes, I knew that.
"He thought you"d die from the beating, but you didn"t. He thought you"d die of the infections, but you didn"t. Now he"s walling off those memories-the vital ones-because he knows it"s his last hope of stopping you."
"How can he? He"s dead."
Al shook his head. "No, that"s me."
"Who is he? What is he? And how can he come back to life? He cut his own throat and the card turned black! I saw it!"
"Dunno, buddy. All I know is that he can"t stop you if you refuse to stop. You have to get at those memories."
"Help me, then!" I shouted, and grabbed the hard claw of his hand. "Tell me the guy"s name! Is it Chapman? Manson? Both of those ring a bell, but neither one seems right. You got me into this, so help me!"
At that point in the dream Al opens his mouth to do just that, but the Yellow Card Man intervenes. If we"re on Main Street, he comes out of the greenfront or the Kennebec Fruit. If it"s the cemetery, he rises from an open grave like a George Romero zombie. If in the diner, the door bursts open. The card he wears in the hatband of his fedora is so black it looks like a rectangular hole in the world. He"s dead and decomposing. His ancient overcoat is splotched with mold. His eye-sockets are writhing b.a.l.l.s of worms.
"He can"t tell you nothing because it"s double-money day!" the Yellow Card Man who is now the Black Card Man screams.
I turn back to Al, only Al has become a skeleton with a cigarette clamped in its teeth, and I wake up, sweating. I reach for the memories but the memories aren"t there.
Deke brought me the newspaper stories about the impending Kennedy visit, hoping they would jog something loose. They didn"t. Once, while I was lying on the couch (I was just coming out of one of my sudden sleeps), I heard the two of them arguing yet again about calling the police. Deke said an anonymous tip would be disregarded and one that came with a name attached would get all of us in trouble.
"I don"t care!" Sadie shouted. "I know you think he"s nuts, but what if he"s right? How are you going to feel if Kennedy goes back to Washington from Dallas in a box?"
"If you bring the police in, they"ll focus on Jake, sweetie. And according to you, he killed a man up in New England before he came here."
Sadie, Sadie, I wish you hadn"t told him that.
She stopped arguing, but she didn"t give up. Sometimes she tried to surprise it out of me, the way you can supposedly surprise someone out of the hiccups. It didn"t work.
"What am I going to do with you?" she asked sadly.
"I don"t know."
"Try to come at it some other way. Try to sneak up on it."
"I have. I think the guy was in the Army or the Marines." I rubbed at the back of my head, where the ache was starting again. "But it might have been the Navy. s.h.i.t, Christy, I don"t know."
"Sadie, Jake. I"m Sadie."
"Isn"t that what I said?"
She shook her head and tried to smile.
On the twelfth, the Tuesday after Veterans Day, the Morning News ran a long editorial about the impending Kennedy visit and what it meant for the city. "Most residents seem ready to welcome the young and inexperienced president with open arms," the piece said. "Excitement is running high. Of course it doesn"t hurt that his pretty and charismatic wife will be along for the ride."
"More dreams about the Yellow Card Man last night?" Sadie asked when she came in. She"d spent the holiday in Jodie, mostly to water her houseplants and to "show the flag," as she put it.
I shook my head. "Honey, you"ve been here a lot more than you"ve been in Jodie. What"s the status of your job?"
"Miz Ellie put me on part-time. I"m getting by, and when I go with you . . . if we go . . . I guess I"ll just have to see what happens."
Her gaze shifted away from me and she busied herself lighting a cigarette. Watching her take too long tamping it on the coffee table and then fiddling with her matches, I realized a dispiriting thing: Sadie was also having her doubts. I"d predicted a peaceful end to the Missile Crisis, I had known d.i.c.k Tiger was going down in the fifth . . . but she still had her doubts. And I didn"t blame her. If our positions had been reversed, I would have been having mine.
Then she brightened. "But I"ve got a heck of a good stand-in, and I bet you can guess who."
I smiled. "Is it . . ." I couldn"t get the name. I could see him-the weathered, suntanned face, the cowboy hat, the string tie-but that Tuesday morning I couldn"t even get close. My head started to ache in the back, where it had hit the baseboard-but what baseboard, in what house? It was so abysmally f.u.c.ked up not to know.
Kennedy"s coming in ten days and I can"t even remember that old guy"s f.u.c.king name.
"Try, Jake."
"I am," I said. "I am, Sadie!"
"Wait a sec. I"ve got an idea."
She laid her smoldering cigarette in one of the ashtray grooves, got up, went out the front door, closed it behind her. Then she opened it and spoke in a voice that was comically gruff and deep, saying what the old guy said each time he came to visit: "How you doin today, son? Takin any nourishment?"
"Deke," I said. "Deke Simmons. He was married to Miz Mimi, but she died in Mexico. We had a memorial a.s.sembly for her."
The headache was gone. Just like that.
Sadie clapped her hands and ran to me. I got a long and lovely kiss.
"See?" she said when she drew back. "You can do this. It"s still not too late. What"s his name, Jake? What"s the crazy b.u.g.g.e.r"s name?"
But I couldn"t remember.