Time and Again

by Jack Finney

  "Cold, you say. Well, people can get used to anything, I suppose, and we get so used to the cold after a while that maybe we don't mind it much. They used to let us sit down, but a couple of winters ago a man was frozen to death. The car came into the depot, and the driver was found on his stool stiff and stark, with one hand on the brake, and the reins in the other. He had dozed off, and he never woke up. He was a lucky man. The worst place he could go to was warm at least, though I've heard the Eskimos think hell is a cold place. Anyway, he never was obliged to drive a car again at a dollar and ninety cents a day. After that what did the company do: close in the platforms? No, that costs money. A rule was passed that employees should not be allowed to sit down, lest they go to sleep and freeze to death. They say it's a very pleasant way to die, and I believe it, for more than once I've felt myself dozing off and becoming insensible to the cold. But I roused myself and stamped to keep awake, for I thought of the little ones; at least they don't sleep in the hay barges, as they might have to if I was gone."

  "Hay barges?"

  He looked at me angrily for not knowing. "Where do you think the boys—and yes, the girls, too—who shine your shoes and sell you papers in the daytime sleep at night? They're orphans, most of them, or kids nobody wants, and left to shift for themselves. A few of them sleep in the newsboys' homes and the like, but most sleep anywhere they can. Go down to the East River right now, and shine a light on the hay barges, hundreds of them, tied along the docks and shore. And you'll see the boys—some say thousands, and I think so, too, though nobody rightly knows—curled up in little nests they scratch up for themselves, and some of them not five years old. So I learn to stand the cold for the sake of my own. Sometimes I try to keep warm by an occasional dram of whiskey, but I find the reaction makes you feel all the colder afterward."

  Up ahead a man in a derby, wearing a heavy pullover sweater, the top of his gray winter underwear visible at the neck, came running out of a saloon toward the car stop at the corner. As the car slowed for the stop, I decided to get off, and stepped down onto the boarding step wondering what to say to the driver: Good luck? I didn't think so; I didn't think he was ever going to have any. The car stopped, and I looked back over my shoulder at the driver. "Goodbye," I said, and he nodded. "Goodbye."

  During my time in the army I was taught how to use your eyes at night; you don't look directly at what you're trying to see. Instead you look off to the side at something else; then, from the corner of your eye, what you really want to see will come clearer. Sometimes the mind works in the same indirect way when you let a problem alone, not forcing an answer. I walked over to Broadway, found a hansom at the Metropolitan Hotel, and by the time I got back to Gramercy Park I knew what I had to do.

  It was a long ride up the dark deserted business section of Broadway, but I was out of the wind, wrapped to the waist in a heavy fur robe that was a little mangy, a little smelly, but after a while cozy and warm. The steady unvarying clap-clop, clap-clop, clap-clop of the horse's hoofs, muffled by the steamed-over window glass, was hypnotic, and the thoughts rose in my mind without effort. The city had been a magical place earlier this evening, filled with sleighs and the sound of singing and genuine laughter. But now late at night I understood that it was also the city of the streetcar driver I'd just talked to. And that while I'd been dashing through Central Park in Jake's sleigh, countless lost children were hunting places to sleep at the bottoms of East River hay barges. And now the city was no longer only an exotic background to my own strange adventure. Now it was real, and now I finally understood that I was really here in these times, and that these people were alive. And that so was Julia.

  Observe, don't interfere: It was a rule easy to formulate and of obvious necessity at the project ... where the people of this time were only ghosts long vanished from reality, nothing remaining of them but odd-looking sepia photographs lying in old albums or in nameless heaps shoved under antique-store counters in cardboard boxes. But where I was now, they were alive. Where I was now, Julia's life wasn't long since over and forgotten; it still lay ahead. And was as valuable as any other. That was the key: If in my own time I couldn't stand by and allow the life of a girl I knew and liked to be destroyed if I could prevent it, I finally knew that I couldn't do it here either.

  Would it be destroyed? I thought about it, and the cab swung off Broadway at Union Square, toward Fourth Avenue, and I wiped the mist from the window with a sleeve, and saw a theater sign under glowing yellow globes: TONY PASTOR'S NEW 14TH STREET THEATRE, it said, and on easel posters at every entrance PATIENCE; OR, THE STAGE-STRUCK MAIDEN. SEE MISS LILLIAN RUSSELL! A GRATIFYING SUCCESS; AN ARTISTIC GEM, and I had an impulse to stop and see the last of the play, but I had too much to think about. Even though I'd known Julia only a matter of hours, actually, I was certain I knew something about her. If you have the ability to make a true portrait of someone, you will learn more about her in the making of it than you otherwise might over days and even weeks of casual acquaintance. I've always appreciated the story you read now and then about the psychiatrist—he would have been called an alienist then—who stood staring at a portrait painted by Sargent or Whistler, I don't remember which. It was a portrait of a man who had been his patient, and after the alienist had studied it for twenty minutes he nodded, and said, "Now I understand what was wrong with him." Well, I'm not Whistler or Sargent, I haven't their talent or insight. But to capture the person on paper or canvas you must observe more than the camera can see. And—yes, I did know that for the particular person who was Julia Charbonneau, a life as the wife of Jacob Pickering would change the face I drew into one of permanent bitter unhappiness, and I simply was not going to allow that.

  The consequences to the future of interference with the past? I shrugged: There were always consequences to any future of every act in the past. To affect the course of an event in my own time was to affect still another future unimaginably, yet we all did it every moment of our lives. And now the future which was my own time was going to have to take its chances. Because now I knew that I just wasn't going to let Julia go down the drain as though somehow she didn't matter but we did. I swayed as the cab turned onto Twentieth Street, and then a block later onto Gramercy Park. And as it slowed and stopped before Number 19, I was smiling: I knew now that I was going to find a way somehow to break Julia's engagement to Jake Pickering; and who could say, it had occurred to me, that the consequences to my own time, if any, wouldn't be an improvement? It was a time that could stand some.

  18

  I was out on the streets in the morning right after a breakfast I could hardly sit still long enough to eat. Aunt Ada served it, along with the Times, but I didn't even try to read; I couldn't do anything, really, but think over and over, This is the day. Tonight at twelve Pickering and Carmody would meet in City Hall Park. Nothing could keep me from being there too, and I felt I knew intuitively that I was finally going to know what the note in the blue envelope meant. "...the Destruction by Fire of the entire World... " The words were senseless, they didn't mean anything, only—they did: On a day far in the future Andrew Carmody would put a bullet through his head because of them.

  I don't know how I could have been so stupid—so just plain dumb—but it seemed to me I had nothing to do but fill in the day somehow till it was time to leave for the meeting in the park. I went upstairs and got Felix's camera from his room; he'd said I could, urged me, in fact, and last night at Gabe Case's had repeated the offer. The camera used dry plates which he kept in a box in his closet. He had two dozen of them, so I filled his little varnished-wood carrying case with them. It held ten, and I put another in the camera; there were pictures all over town that I wanted.

  Manhattan Island is small; you can cover it from one end to the other in a day, so I took the El down to the Battery first. There was a wait for the train, and I got all focused; the camera had a sliding bellows of red leather, very nice to adjust. I stood waiting for a train then, and out of nowhere a sudden stab o
f worry pricked my mind: Was there something I ought to be doing, of the utmost importance, instead of this? But the platform was trembling minutely, far down the tracks a train had appeared—from downtown, but it didn't matter to my shot—and I had the camera up, holding it steady till the train moved into focus. This is the shot I got, and by the time I had it and had changed plates, the unresolved doubt had drifted from my mind.

  Battery Park was pleasant; a lot of snow, but the paths had been cleared. I saw a scattering of newly arrived immigrants there, getting their first look at the country, and I couldn't resist a shot of them.

  I took the El up to the Brooklyn Bridge then—a real tourist—and climbed the tower by a set of wooden ladders, careful never to look down till I stepped out onto the top of the tower. Without giving myself any chance to think, I started right on across a little temporary wooden suspension bridge strung high over the unfinished permanent roadway. But the thing swayed! The handhold was nothing but thin cable-wire, and there wasn't a thing, if you tripped, to keep you from falling off and down, down, down. It was impossibly high, swinging in a chill winter breeze. With my eyes on the wooden planking along which my feet shuffled, hardly daring to lift, I couldn't help Looking between the cracks—at the lead gray river infinitely far below and the horribly empty spaces of the roadway. Ten steps, and I couldn't go on. I turned around, and two men were walking toward me. There was no room to sidle past them and back to the tower; if I tried I knew I'd fall.

  Over a period of time that went on and on and on forever, I forced myself through step after step, the thin handhold sliding through my clenched hand till my palm was raw and black with dirt. Then finally I stepped off onto the top of the Brooklyn tower, wonderfully solid under my feet, beautifully wide; and I stood swallowing, feeling the sweat of imminent disaster drying on my face.

  This is the shot I got up there and I'm proud of it. The two men who had been walking across the bridge behind me, I saw, had stopped in the middle for the view, one of them actually leaning back against the wire handhold; I could hardly look at him. But isn't it a tremendous view? That's Trinity off in the distance to the far left. I felt great now, very glad that I'd—bravely, I tried to tell myself—made the trip across. But I took the ferry back to Manhattan.

  And within fifty yards I was deep in the slums and within two blocks had seen far more than I wanted to see; the one photograph I took there will show you why. The sidewalks were clear of snow, but were filled with trash barrels as though there hadn't been a collection in weeks, as I expect there hadn't. And the streets were worse, the gutters piled with snow that was almost completely covered with mounds of garbage and refuse, dirt, and filth of all kinds. Here's the shot I took. We don't care very much about what happens to our poor, but the nineteenth century cared even less, it seems to me.

  I suppose it was cowardly, but there was nothing at all I could do about this, and it was too depressing; walking fast, I headed straight across town toward City Hall Park; I wanted out of there. When I reached Park Row, I glanced left, saw the Times Building and directly beside it the building in which Jake had his secret office, and at the sight of it the thought flared up in my mind like a rocket: They won't stay in the park! For a moment I stood motionless on the walk. How could I have missed it? What kind of woolly-headed lack of thought had made me picture Pickering and Carmody sitting across the street there in the park—in the dark of midnight!

  I turned onto Park Row toward the Potter Building. And I knew it was true. Jake wouldn't bring whatever documents he had into the park—to be possibly taken by force by whomever Carmody might have hiding there. And he'd want to count the money besides. As for Carmody, he wouldn't be handing over the money till he'd actually examined Pickering's documents. They'd go to Jake's office for this transaction; they had to. There was no way for me to overhear the meeting.

  I stopped on the walk and stood staring up at the building; I wasn't thinking of photographs now. The building hadn't changed: The upper stories were four identical rows of narrow arch-topped windows that had nothing to say to me; the storefronts of the street level were dirty-windowed as ever, their summer awnings ripped and torn, folded back to the wall, the grillwork protecting the windows' rusting and flaking paint; they had no hope for themselves, and none to offer. I glanced up at the long narrow signs identifying the offices of the chief tenants, which hung under some of the upper-story windows like those on the faces of most lower-Broadway buildings. They hung tilted outward, to be read from the street, and as I had once before I read them again. TURF, FIELD AND FARM, said the raised gold letters on the long black-painted background hung under a row of fourth-floor windows; THE RETAILER, said another, and THE SCOTTISH AMERICAN, a third. Under a row of third-floor windows hung SCIENTIFIC-AMERICAN, and—with no more interest than I had in the rest—I glanced again at the sign I would never forget: THE NEW-YORK OBSERVER.

  For no particular reason except to see the other faces of the building—which looked the same as the first, I found—I walked around the building, along Beekman Street, then turned into Nassau Street, and I entered through the Nassau Street entrance. This time when I stepped into the vestibule there was no sound of sawing or pulling of nails, and when I climbed the stairs to the second floor the doorway of the office I'd seen the carpenters in was closed. Not only closed, but now the doorway was solidly boarded across, floor to ceiling, and painted with warnings; obviously they'd finished removing the floor in there. Climbing to the third floor, I thought they might be working up there now, or about to begin, and that somehow this might give me the chance I needed.

  But everything looked the same on the third floor. If they'd been working up here since my last visit, they weren't now; the door was padlocked as before, the same red-painted warning across it. Once again I tried the door to Pickering's office, but without hope, and it was locked.

  Nothing had changed; I squatted down, looked in through the keyhole, and once again I saw the rolltop desk and the chair across the room before the tall thin window; and the connecting boarded-up doorway to the right. Then I straightened, and just stood there in the hall, helplessly. There was simply no way to get in. Yet I had to. I stood trying to think of everything I'd ever heard about breaking into a locked room. Slide a strip of plastic or celluloid into the door jamb and it could push back the lock, said stories I'd read. But that was a kind of lock not in use yet; this was a different kind with no spring to push back. There was no way to get in; I stood in that narrow corridor, lighted by a single open-flame gas jet, staring angrily and stubbornly at that locked door. Someone came up and someone went down the staircase off to my right, and each time I turned—camera at my side, hanging by its strap now—and walked toward the main corridor as though I were leaving. When the footsteps receded I returned.

  I couldn't leave; I was hypnotized. I thought wildly of such things as coming hand over hand down a rope from the roof to the window of Room 27 or the closed-up room next to it. Or of somehow climbing up into the half-finished elevator shaft to the underside of the third floor, and then ... then what? I didn't know.

  I heard the preliminary rattle of a door about to be opened in my corridor, and turned swiftly, walking to the stairs ahead of whoever came out of an office behind me. I went up the staircase, he went down, then I turned and came back and once more stood helplessly and stubbornly in the corridor. A minute passed, I suppose; I knew I might as well leave, but couldn't.

  Soft shuffling footsteps—carpet slippers, so that I didn't hear them before they turned the corner into my corridor—sounded directly behind me, and I whirled around. The old janitor was walking slowly toward me, head ducked as he squinted at a little stack of letters he was shuffling through his hands. He hadn't seen me yet, but the moment he raised his head he would; the corridor was much too narrow for me to sneak past him, and there was no other place I could go. I had time to arrange a pleasant smile, then he looked up, stopped, and stood frowning at me; he'd seen me before, he knew that, b
ut he couldn't place me.

  Then suddenly he remembered, and nodded. "Morning, Mr. Pickering; no mail for you," and he walked on past me, sliding envelopes under some of the numbered doors. Nothing happened inside my brain. During the fifteen seconds or so it took him to reach the end of the short corridor, turn, and come back, I just stood looking at him. Again he looked up at me, and now he was irritated. "What's the matter; forget your key?" he said, and before I could reply he was shaking his head in angry refusal. "Got no duplicate, not for that door! Supposed to have, and used to have; yes. But it's gone now. I can't help you! You'll have to go home and get your own. I got no time—"

  I was grinning, genuinely, when I interrupted him. "Yes, you have," I said softly. "You've got a duplicate, and you know it. But it's a long way off, isn't it? Clear down in the basement." I had my notecase out, and I took out a dollar bill. "But it's not as far as I'd have to go to get my own.'' I handed him the dollar. "Come on," I said, "I'll go down with you, and save you the trip back up again."

  Two minutes later, climbing the stairs from the basement, I had the key with a dirty paper tag labeled 27 in my hand, but I didn't go upstairs with it. I walked straight through the building, out onto Park Row, and next door in the Times Building I found the locksmith whose sign I remembered, near Nash & Crook's Restaurant in the basement floor. He charged me ten cents to cut a duplicate, and I walked back tying the paper tag back onto the original key. Fifteen minutes after he'd given it to me, I handed it back to the janitor whom I found distributing the second-floor mail.