The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I went down to the library where they had Britannicas, World Books, old Compton’s. Everybody else in the place was on, or waiting in line for, the Internet.

  I sat down by the reference shelves and opened four or five encyclopedias to the entries on Nixon. All of them started Nixon, Richard Milhous, and then in brackets (1913–1977).

  After the fifth one, I got up and went over to the reference librarian, who’d just unjammed one of the printers. She looked up at me and smiled, and as I said it, I knew I should not have, but I said, “All your encyclopedias are wrong.”

  The smile stayed on her face.

  And then I thought Here’s a guy standing in front of her; he’s in his fifties; he looks a little peaked, and he’s telling her all her reference books are wrong. Just like I once heard a guy, in his fifties, a little peaked, yelling at a librarian that some book in the place was trying to tell him that Jesus had been a Jew!

  What would you do?

  Before she could do anything, I said, “Excuse me.”

  “Certainly,” she said.

  I left in a hurry.

  My son-in-law came over the next morning when he should have been asleep.

  He looked a little different (His ears were longer. It took a little while to notice that was it.) and he seemed a little older, but he looked pretty much the same as always.

  “Hey. Mo sent me over to do the major overhaul on the band saw.”

  “Fuck it,” I said. “It’s the switch. I can do it in my sleep.”

  “She said she’d feel better if you let me do it.”

  “Buzz off.”

  He laughed and grabbed one of the beers he keeps in my refrigerator. “Okay, then,” he said, “can I borrow a couple of albums to tape? I want the kids to hear what real music sounds like.”

  He had a pretty good selection of 45s, albums, and CDs, even some shellac 78s. He’s got a couple of old turntables (one that plays 16 rpm, even). But I have some stuff on vinyl he doesn’t.

  “Help yourself,” I said. He went to the living room and started making noises opening cabinets.

  I mentioned The Who.

  “Who?”

  “Not who. The Who.”

  “What do you mean, who?”

  “Who. The rock group. The Who.”

  “Who?”

  “No, no. The rock group, which is named The Who.”

  “What is this,” he asked. “Abbott and Hardy?”

  “We’ll get to that later,” I said. “Same time as the early Beatles. That …”

  “Who?”

  “Let me start over. Roger Daltry. Pete Townsend. John Entwistle. Keith —”

  “The High Numbers!” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “A minute ago. I said they came along with the early Beatles and you said —”

  “Who?”

  “Do not start.”

  “There is no rock band called the Beetles,” he said with authority.

  I looked at him. “Paul McCartney …”

  He cocked his head, gave me a go-on gesture.

  “… John Lennon, George Harri …”

  “You mean the Quarrymen?” he asked.

  “… son, Ringo Starr.”

  “You mean Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe,” he said.

  “Sir Richard Starkey. Ringo Starr. From all the rings on his fingers.”

  “The Quarrymen. Five guys. They had a few hits in the early Sixties. Wrote a shitpot of songs for other people. Broke up in 1966. Boring old farts since then—tried comeback albums, no back to come to. Lennon lives in a trailer in New Jersey. God knows where the rest of them are.”

  “Lennon’s dead,” I said. “He was assassinated at the Dakota Apartments in NYC in 1980 by a guy who wanted to impress Jodie Foster.”

  “Well, then, CNTV’s got it all wrong, because they did a where-are-they-now thing a couple of weeks ago, and he looked pretty alive to me. He talked a few minutes and showed them some Holsteins or various other moo-cows, and a reporter made fun of them, and Lennon went back into the trailer and closed the door.”

  I knew they watched a lot of TV at the firehouse.

  “This week they did one on ex-President Kennedy. It was his eighty-fourth birthday or something. He’s the one that looked near-dead to me—they said he’s had Parkinson’s since the Sixties. They only had one candle on the cake, but I bet like Popeye these days, he had to eat three cans of spinach just to blow it out. His two brothers took turns reading a proclamation from President Gore. It looked like he didn’t know who that was. His mom had to help him cut the cake. Then his wife Marilyn kissed him. He seemed to like that.”

  I sat there quietly a few minutes.

  “In your family,” I asked, “who’s Bill?”

  He quit thumbing through the albums. He took in his breath a little too loudly. He looked at me.

  “Edward,” he said, “I’m Bill.”

  “Then who’s Bob?”

  “Bob was what they called my younger brother. He lived two days. He’s out at Kid Heaven in Greenwood. You, me, and Mo went out there last Easter. Remember?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said.

  “Are you sure you’re okay, after the shock, I mean?”

  “Fit as a fiddle,” I said, lying through my teeth.

  “You sure you don’t need help with the saw?”

  “It’ll be a snap.”

  “Well, be careful.”

  “The breakers are still off.”

  “Thanks for the beer,” he said, putting a couple of albums under his arm and going toward the door.

  “Bye. Go get some sleep.” I said.

  I’ll have to remember to call Bob, Bill.

  Mo was back, in a hurry.

  “What is it, Dad? I’ve never seen Bill so upset.”

  “I don’t know. Things are just so mixed up. In fact, they’re wrong.”

  “What do you mean, wrong? I’m really worried about you now, and so’s Bill.”

  I’ve never been a whiner, even in the worst of times.

  “Oh, Dad,” she said. “Maybe you should go see Doc Adams, maybe get some tests done. See if he can’t recommend someone …”

  “You mean, like I’ve got Alzheimer’s? I don’t have Alzheimer’s! It’s not me, it’s the world that’s off the trolley. Yesterday—I don’t know, it’s like everything I thought I knew is wrong. It’s like some Mohorovic discontinuity of the mind. Nixon was president. He had to resign because of a break-in at the Watergate Hotel, the Democratic National Headquarters, in 1972. I have a bumper sticker somewhere: “Behind Every Watergate Is A Milhous.” It was the same bunch of guys who set up Kennedy in 1963. It was …”

  I started to cry. Maureen didn’t know whether to come to me or not.

  “Are you thinking about Mom?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m thinking about your mother.”

  Then she hugged me.

  I don’t know what to say.

  I’m a bright enough guy. I’m beginning to understand, though, about how people get bewildered.

  On my way from the library after embarrassing myself, I passed the comic book and poster shop two blocks away. There were reproduction posters in one window; the famous one of Clark Gable and Paulette Goddard with the flames of Atlanta behind them from Mules in Horses’ Harnesses; Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie in The Road To Morroco, and window cards from James Dean in Somebody Up There Likes Me, along with Giant and East of Eden.

  I came home and turned on the oldies station. It wasn’t there, one like it was somewhere else on the dial.

  It was just like Bo—Bill said. The first thing I heard was The Quarrymen doing “Gimme Deine Hande.” I sat there for two hours, till it got dark, without turning on the lights, listening. There were familiar tunes by somebody else, called something else. There were the right songs by the right people. Janis I. Fink seemed to be in heavy rotation, three songs in the two hours, both before and after she went to prison, according to the DJ. The
things you find out on an oldies station …

  I heard no Chuck Berry, almost an impossibility.

  Well, I will try to live here. I’ll just have to be careful finding my way around in it. Tomorrow, after the visit to the doc, it’s back to the library.

  Before going to bed, I rummaged around in my “Important Papers” file. I took out my old draft notice.

  It wasn’t from Richard Nixon, like it has been for the last thirty-two years. It was from Barry Goldwater. (Au + H20 = 1968?)

  The psychiatrist seemed like a nice-enough guy. We talked a few minutes about the medical stuff Doc Adams had sent over; work, the shock, what Mo had told the doc.

  “Your daughter seems to think you’re upset about your environment. Can you tell me why she thinks that?”

  “I think she means to say I told her this was not the world I was born in and have lived in for fifty-six years,” I said.

  He didn’t write anything down in his pad.

  “It’s all different,” I said. He nodded.

  “Since the other morning, everything I’ve known all my life doesn’t add up. The wrong people have been elected to office. History is different. Not just the politics-battles-wars stuff, but also social history, culture. There’s a book of social history by a guy named Furnas. I haven’t looked, but I bet that’s all different, too. I’ll get it out of the library today. If it’s there. If there’s a guy named Furnas anymore.”

  I told him some of the things that were changed—just in two days’ worth. I told him it—some of it anyway—was fascinating, but I’m sure I’ll find scary stuff sooner or later. I’d have to learn to live with it, go with the flow.

  “What do you think happened?” he asked.

  “What is this, The Sopranos?”

  “Beg pardon?” he asked.

  “Oh. Oh. You’d like it. It’s a TV show about a Mafia guy who, among other things, goes to a shrink—a lady shrink. It’s on HBO.”

  “HBO?”

  “Sorry. A cable network.”

  He wrote three things down on his pad.

  “Look. Where I come from … I know that sounds weird. In Lindner’s book …”

  “Lindner?”

  “Lindner. The Fifty-Minute Hour. Best-seller. 1950s.”

  “I take it by the title it was about psychiatry. And a best-seller?”

  “Let me start over. He wrote the book they took the title Rebel Without A Cause from—but that had nothing to do with the movie …”

  He was writing stuff down now, fast.

  “It’s getting deeper and deeper, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Go on. Please.”

  “Lindner had a patient who was a guy who thought he lived on a far planet in an advanced civilization—star-spanning galaxy-wide stuff. Twenty years before Star Wars. Anyway …”

  He wrote down two words without taking his eyes off me.

  “In my world,” I said, very slowly and carefully, looking directly at him, “there was a movie called Star Wars in 1977 that changed the way business was done in Hollywood.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “This is not getting us anywhere!” I said.

  And then he came out with the most heartening thing I’d heard in two days. He said, “What do you mean we, kemo sabe?”

  Well, we laughed and laughed, and then I tried to tell him, really tell him, what I thought I knew.

  The past was another country, as they say; they did things differently there.

  The more I looked up, the more I needed to look up. I had twelve or fifteen books scattered across the reference tables.

  Now I know how conspiracy theorists feel. It’s not just the Trilateral Commission or Henry Kissinger (a minor ABC/NRC official here) and the Queen of England and Area 51 and the Grays. It’s like history has ganged up on me, as an individual, to drive me bugfuck. I don’t have a chance. The more you find out the more you need to explain … how much more you need to find out … it could never end.

  Where did it change?

  We are trapped in history like insects in amber, and it is hardening all around me.

  Who am I to struggle against the tree sap of Time?

  The psychiatrist has asked me to write down and bring in everything I can think of—anything: presidents, cars, wars, culture. He wants to read it ahead of time and schedule two full hours on Friday.

  You can bet I don’t feel swell about this.

  My other daughter Celine is here. I had tried and tried and tried, but she’d turned out to be a Christian in spite of all my work.

  She is watching me like a hawk, I can tell. We were never as close as Maureen and me; she was her mother’s daughter.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Just peachy,” I said. “Considering.”

  “Considering what?” Her eyes were very green, like her mother’s had been.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m pretty tired of answering questions. Or asking them.”

  “You ought to be more careful with those tools.”

  “This is not about power tools, or the shock,” I said. “I don’t know what Mo told you, but I have been truly discomfited these last few days.”

  “Look, Daddy,” she said. “I don’t care what the trouble is, we’ll find a way to get you through it.”

  “You couldn’t get me through it, unless you’ve got a couple of thousand years on rewind.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I’m just tired. And I have to go to the hardware store and get a new switch for the band saw, before I burn the place down, or cause World War III or something. I’m sure they have hardware stores here, or I wouldn’t have power tools.”

  She looked at me like I’d grown tentacles.

  “Just kidding,” I said. “Loosen up, Celine. Think of me right now as your old, tired father. I’ll learn my way around the place and be right as rain …”

  Absolutely no response.

  “I’m being ironic,” I said. “I have always been noted for my sense of humor. Remember?”

  “Well, yes. Sort of.”

  “Great!” I said. “Let’s go get some burgers at McDonald’s!”

  “Where?”

  “I mean Burger King,” I said. I’d passed one on the way back from the library.

  “Sounds good, Dad.” She said, “Let me drive.”

  I have lived in this house for twenty-six years. I was born in the house across the street. In 1957, my friend Gino Ballantoni lived here, and I was over here every day, or just about, for four years, till Gino’s father’s aircraft job moved to California. I’d always wanted it, and after I got out of the Army, I got it on the GI Bill.

  I know its every pop and groan, every sound it makes day or night, the feel of the one place the paint isn’t smooth, on the inside doorjamb trim of what used to be Mo’s room before it was Celine’s. There’s one light switch put on upside down I never changed. The garage makeover I did myself; it’s what’s now the living room.

  I love this place. I would have lived here no matter what.

  I tell myself history wasn’t different enough that this house isn’t still a vacant lot, or an apartment building. That’s, at least, something to hang onto.

  I noticed the extra sticker inside the car windshield. Evidently, we now have an emissions-control test in this state, too. I’ll have to look in the phone book and find out where to go, as this one expires at the end of the month.

  And also, on TV, when they show news from New York, there’s still the two World Trade Center Towers.

  You can’t be too careful about the past.

  The psychiatrist called to ask if someone could sit in on the double session tomorrow—he knew it was early, but it was special—his old mentor from whatever Mater he’d Alma’d at; the guy was in a day early for some shrink hoedown in the Big City and wanted to watch his star pupil in action. He was asking all the patients tomorrow, he said. The old doc wouldn’t say anything, and you’d hardly know he was there.


  “Well, I got enough troubles, what’s one more?”

  He thanked me.

  That’s what did it for me. This was not going to stop. This was not something that I could be helped to work through, like bedwetting or agoraphobia or the desire to eat human flesh. It was going to go on forever, here, until I died.

  Okay, I thought. Let’s get out Occam’s Famous Razor and cut a few Gordian Knots. Or somewhat, as the logicians used to say.

  I went out to the workshop where everybody thinks it all started.

  I turned on the outside breakers. I went inside. This time I closed the door. I went over and turned on the bandsa

  After I got up off the floor, I opened the door and stepped out into the yard. It was near dark, so I must have been out an hour or so.

  I turned off the breakers and went into the house through the back door and through the utility room and down the hall to the living room bookcase. I pulled out Vol 14 of the encyclopedia and opened it.

  Nixon, Richard Milhous, it said (1913–1994). A good long entry.

  There was a sound from the kitchen. The oven door opened and closed.

  “What have you been doing?” asked a voice.

  “There’s a short in the band saw I’ll have to get fixed,” I said. I went around the corner.

  It was my wife Susan. She looked a little older, a little heavier since I last saw her, it seemed. She still looked pretty good.

  “Stand there where I can see you,” I said.

  “We were having a fight before you wandered away, remember?”

  “Whatever it was,” I said, “I was wrong. You were right. We’ll do whatever it is you want.”

  “Do you even remember what it was we were arguing about?”

  “No,” I said. “Whatever. It’s not important. The problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in —”

  “Cut the Casablanca crap,” said Susan. “Jodie and Susie Q want to bring the kids over next Saturday and have Little Eddy’s birthday party here. You wanted peace and quiet here, and go somewhere else for the party. That was the argument.”

  “I wasn’t cut out to be a grandpa,” I said. “But bring ’em on. Invite the neighbors! Put out signs on the street! ‘Annoy an old man here!’”