Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  He passed through the vestibule into the inner reaches of Rodgers, Wirth & Maddox, known familiarly as RWM, none of whose founders was still alive, and went to his part of its world, an enclosure with walls and two doorways but without doors that could be closed. A certain separation from the rest of the office was useful, but for this kind of work there was no need for privacy—with a few exceptions during Hunsicker’s long tenure: e.g., the memoirs of a former secretary of the treasury which, the publicity and advertising departments vulgarly hinted, were to reveal a lot of dirt on his former political colleagues. Access to this manuscript was restricted and Hunsicker himself had done all the copy-editing thereof, in the borrowed corner office of a vice-president (the promotional promise was exaggerated: most of the “revelations” had been known for ages and the rest were petty).

  Three full-time copy-editors comprised Hunsicker’s department, not counting him, and during the busy seasons when the manuscripts came in multitudes, he had to resort to a list of auxiliary free-lancers if the publishing schedule was to be met.

  All three of his subordinates (though at least two of them would have rejected that term) were at work as he entered now. Myron Beckersmith, a tall, knobby young man with intense eyes under heavy brows, was poring over one of the tomes from the small but versatile reference library maintained by the copy-editing department on a wall of shelves not too far behind the desk of Carrie Janes, a pudgy young woman with a complexion of pearl, the newest member of the team and the most learned, having actually studied classical Greek. Carrie at the moment was exercising her most annoying habit, blowing the hanging hair away from her eyes rather than pinning it back in some fashion or, better yet—given a profession that kept her bending all day over a sheaf of paper—having a more practical coiffure. And worse than watching her fat lower lip extend, chimpanzee-style, to puff air upwards, was to check over a manuscript when her job was done (as head of department, Hunsicker always did this, for it was he who bore the official responsibility for any errors or oversights) and find stray hairs throughout: to Hunsicker this was almost as offensive as if he had found such in his lunchtime bowl of soup.

  His return now was visibly marked only by the remaining member of the trio, Dorothy Kalergis, the eldest after him though at forty-one not all that old. She was also the only one other than he to have been married and have children, with the difference that Dorothy was a divorcée of some years and her children were still young enough to live with her.

  She looked up now and winked sardonically at him. There was a possibility that she had formerly had some hopes he might wish to extend their professional association, which was amiable, into private life, and that her tendency to guy him in more recent times was founded in disappointment. The fact was that even if he had been free, he would not have been attracted sexually to Dorothy, who was of the type for which he had least physical taste, being thin to the point of gauntness, with nervous, darting eyes and a quick, shrill laugh, hearing which was like being poked in the nape with a sharp pencil.

  “Hope the matinee was everything you hoped it would be,” Dorothy said now. “Would we know the lady?”

  To be a good sport, always advisable in a superior, Hunsicker had to play along with such japery though he found it tiresome.

  “Can’t keep a secret around here!” he complained in mock despair. He hung his damp trench coat on the hall tree in the corner: he had his own.

  Dorothy moued in what suddenly did not seem good-natured irony. “Certainly not if your name is Jack Kellog.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “The name you called me.”

  Dorothy’s nose became sharper. “Yes, your own.”

  At least Hunsicker now had a place to sit while dealing with the weird events that bedeviled him. He sank into the chair behind his desk.

  Suddenly Dorothy became concerned. “Are you okay, Jack? You’re awfully pale.”

  He tried to pull himself together. Dorothy was inclined to believe him excessively frail and older than he was. “I’m not ill,” he said. “I’m preoccupied.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Carrie Janes looked up. She had been distracted from her manuscript and was irritated. The expression caused her face to become a pinched bag. Her eyes were slightly glassy from contact lenses.

  Hunsicker told Dorothy, “Don’t worry about it.”

  She was miffed and turned away.

  He briskly pulled the chair up to his desk, got his eyeglasses from the case in his left inside breast pocket, and having taken the wallet from the corresponding pocket on the right, examined the documents of identification he found there: several credit cards; a little plastic rectangle supplied by the head office of his health plan, with blood type, the address of next of kin, and a negative response to the question of possible allergies to medication; finally, a driver’s license and a car-registration certificate.

  Each of these documents identified a John A. Kellog, and the license bore a photograph of himself.

  Myron Beckersmith closed, with a snap, the reference book he had taken from the shelves. “Say, Jack,” said he, “aren’t there such things as French slang dictionaries? If so, can’t we get one? This is the third manuscript I’ve done in the past year that’s had words and phrases that I can’t find in here.” He slapped the fat volume he was holding; Hunsicker recognized it as their French-English dictionary, published at least thirty years before. “I always have to query the authors. Couldn’t we get something?”

  Beckersmith often requested improvements in equipment and materials. The copy-editors asked questions of the authors on little gummed tags attached to the edge of a page. Hunsicker’s department used the old-fashioned kind the glue of which must be moistened. Myron, perhaps not unreasonably, wanted the self-stick type, but it was not he who had to present this expensive plea to the managing editor, a tightfisted woman whose only apparent interest in books was to produce them as cheaply as possible. But no doubt she had her problems too and was probably oppressed by higher-placed executives. Hunsicker had a certain at least potential sympathy for most human beings.

  But that had been Hunsicker. Kellog was another man. “Sure,” he told Myrón now. “I’ll check the main public library and see what they have.”

  Carrie, more irritated than ever by the new intrusion into her consciousness, looked up and asked, “What word are you looking for?”

  Myron obviously disliked her, as did Dorothy. He frowned and said, “It’s a phrase: faire minette. ‘Do a kitty’? ‘Play with the pussycat’? That doesn’t make sense in the context.”

  Carrie said coldly, “Oral sex.” Myron took too long to understand. “Eating pussy,” she added in impatience. He flushed.

  Dorothy rolled her eyes and snickered.

  Jack Kellog put away the documents that identified him. “With Carrie on hand, we don’t need reference books,” he said with superficial lightheartedness, rising from the chair. “But I’ll go over to the library right now and see what I can find.”

  Dorothy curled her lip in disapproval. “You just got back. You could just look in Books in Print and save a trip.”

  “Ah,” said Kellog, trying to preserve his counterfeit ebullience, “but there might be something published abroad.” He seized his coat.

  “But,” Dorothy protested doggedly, “what about the Haseltine?” She was referring to the proofs over which she had been laboring for days: an exposé of the gynecological profession. The book had been on schedule, but now that a TV magazine-show had done its own provocative investigation in the same area, there was every reason to advance the publication date of the printed work. It had long since been copy-edited and set in type, but when the proofs were shown belatedly to the RWM lawyers, many pretexts for possible libel actions were discovered. Naming names could obviously help book sales, but these were rich and powerful doctors who would surely sue all concerned unless hard evidence of their malfeasa
nce could be established. It was an arduous job of the kind Walter Hunsicker would not have entrusted to anybody but Dorothy. She had to verify with the author, a quondam muckraking tabloid reporter, each of the lawyer’s hundreds of queries, and not only did this man prove to have been very careless in what he wrote, but he seemed to be thoroughly drunk at whichever time of day he was reached by telephone. In person, on the occasions on which he had visited the RWM offices, he appeared to be sober but was extremely obnoxious.

  In any event, Dorothy had at last completed her job that morning, and all that remained was for Hunsicker to give it one more check-through and then his imprimatur: he was to have begun that perusal this afternoon.

  Jack Kellog answered her question. “The world won’t end if we take our time.” He left the room and then the building, and returned, as rapidly as he could walk, to the doorway where he had encountered the little man. The rain having ended by now, he carried the damp trench coat over his arm.

  Finding the doorway unoccupied was no surprise. It was merely a place to start the search, the only point of reference Kellog had with respect to the little man, who unfortunately did not seem to be a vagrant who spent his days on the streets, else he might be sought in similar crannies throughout the midtown area. The fact was, as Kellog stepped into the alcove to formulate a plan of action, he could have no serious hope of locating the person. It had been half an hour since he left him. The choice of directions in which the man could have moved, and the means of movement, foot, bus, etc., were in great variety. It was the kind of situation which Walter Hunsicker, a realist, would have had to accept with his habitual stoicism, as he had submitted, his life long, to the rulings of a Fate that kept him in his proper place in the grand scheme by which he was reasonably comfortable and relatively secure.

  Jack Kellog on the other hand had a constitutional aversion to nay-saying, and his natural state of mind was definitely sanguine in the face of a challenge. Knowing nothing whatever about the habits of the little man, he might as well suppose that chance would be on his side. He prepared to set out in an easterly direction.

  But he was detained by a slight noise behind the door to the shop. From its murky appearance through the dirty windows, he had assumed the place was closed. Who would buy medical appliances from such an unsanitary-looking establishment? Perhaps a burglary was in progress. With a like suspicion, Walter Hunsicker would promptly have moved on, though had he encountered a policeman in the ensuing block or two, he would not have remained silent.

  Jack Kellog, however, not only stood his ground, but took a wide-legged stance should he have to defend himself. But when the door opened and a face peeped out, it was the little man for whom he had come searching!

  Kellog cried, “I want to talk to you.”

  “I thought that might be likely,” said the other. “Come in.”

  Kellog winced in puzzlement as he entered the shop, the interior of which was even drearier than it had looked from the street. There were bins full of crutches of assorted sizes, shelves stacked with bedpans, a parking area for wheelchairs, a table holding arm- and leg-braces, some formed of or covered with a pink plastic with a resemblance to real skin.

  “Do you work here?” he asked the back of the little man, who was leading the way.

  “As good a place as any,” was the answer, given without turning. “I like privacy. Few people come to such a place as this unless they have serious business.”

  He maintained a brisk pace. Soon they had reached a small back office behind a flimsy-looking partition. An open roll-top desk was against one wall: it was a large piece, with a multitude of pigeonholes, all of them stuffed with papers. The little man sat down in the chair that went with the desk and swiveled it to face Kellog. “All right,” he said with a sigh, “let’s hear your complaint.”

  Kellog had been rudely left standing, but that situation suited him for the current purpose. He was really annoyed.

  “I want to know what’s going on! This switching of the coats and identification papers. The people at the office calling me Jack. You got to them somehow. Is this a practical joke? I could believe that of Dorothy and maybe Myron, but Carrie would never go along with it.”

  The little man pointed. “Better sit down while we get this straight.”

  Kellog found a loose-jointed straight-backed chair in a dark corner. He pulled it out and sat gingerly upon it.

  The merchant of crutches resumed. “It’s no joke. What it is, or was supposed to be, was a conclusive demonstration that the past can be changed. Naturally you were skeptical. That’s all to the good. Someone who accepted it immediately would probably be demented. A nut or eccentric would not be acceptable, I assure you. What’s needed is precisely the sort of fellow you were as Walter Hunsicker. By the way, don’t you want to change a lot more than that name? Your job doesn’t go with it.”

  Kellog would have liked to gesture, but he doubted that the chair would stand up to much motion. “I’ll say one thing, though I can’t explain it: my new name already feels natural.”

  The little man shrugged. “Of course. So will anything else you decide on.”

  “You really mean that I could choose to be—”

  The other interrupted. “It’s better to say ‘have been,’ which inevitably involves the present, to be sure, but we should always steer clear of implications of futurity.”

  Kellog was not certain that he understood this fully. He completed his question, “President of the United States?”

  The little man leaned forward and asked, “But would you honestly want that?”

  “No, certainly not. You’re right. Then is that the criterion? That it should be something I would rather have been or done?”

  The little man replied with some heat. “Else it would be capricious, just trickery, a total waste of time, not worth doing!”

  Kellog shook his head. “I still can’t quite believe this conversation is taking place.”

  “Oh, that’s understandable,” said the little man in his first display of sympathy. “Initial faith is required. Remember when you first learned to swim? Or your first experience of sexual intercourse? Sure, everybody else can do it, but you’ll never be able to. But this is only temporary cold feet—once you’ve become habituated you’ll look back with amusement on the time of disbelief.”

  Kellog was still shaking his head. “The difference is that I’ve never heard of anyone’s changing the past. I’d be the first, wouldn’t I?”

  The little man raised a twiglike finger. “You don’t know that, and I’d advise you not to speculate on the matter. It might make a bad impression.”

  “On whom?”

  The man smiled with his irregular front teeth. His expression was suddenly of the kind called boyish. “You never know.”

  “I’m afraid I must know more about this business,” Kellog said. “It might be easy for you to make such a wild assertion—that my past can be changed just like that—and I’ll admit I can’t explain the things that have happened so far, but that doesn’t mean I can blindly accept them, either, without some sense of who’s behind the project.” He threw a thumb at the doorway. “I’m assuming this medical equipment is a false front or cover. Who are you? Government? Ours, I hope.”

  The little man scowled. “If any government, anywhere, had anything to do with it, do you believe it would work?” He snorted. “The riding mac would have been three sizes too big and would have leaked!”

  “No doubt,” Kellog said, “but I really can’t go along with you unless I know more. I want no part of a deal in which I take all the chances and am furthermore in the dark as to the larger picture.”

  “Yeah,” the little man said wryly. “That’s too much like life. But here’s an opportunity to do that one all over again and get it right.”

  Kellog was shaking his head. “Whatever your aim, you’re not going to give me something for nothing.”

  The little man made a rasping sound, politely covering his
mouth, though not before Kellog could see several large silver fillings. “What a cynical fellow you are. That’s still Hunsicker speaking. People who rise higher in life never lose their illusions.”

  “You took me for the kind of jerk who has lived such a dull life he would jump at the chance to change it.”

  “On the contrary, Walter—I mean Jack—you were chosen because you were seemingly satisfied with your life.”

  “You’re giving me another chance to be unhappy?”

  “Only if you perversely choose to be negative about the matter.” The little man rubbed his wrinkled nose. “It’s up to you, of course.”

  Kellog said levelly, “It’s not worth my soul.”

  “You’re being melodramatic. Look here, any time you want to change your past, you come here to the store—during business hours, of course, nine to six on weekdays only—and it will be arranged without delay. In answer to your question: this program is a scientific experiment, a study in human volition.”

  Kellog assumed he would have to sign a paper or at least shake hands, but the little man said merely, “Then let’s get on with it. I gather the name Jack Kellog is satisfactory. If not, it can be changed again. Now what do you want by way of profession, home, wife, children…?”