Changing the Past (2 page)

Hunsicker could not have said why he responded to this preposterous question, but he did. “An hour earlier. One-thirty should do it.”

“Right you are,” said the little man, pointing at Hunsicker's wrist. “Take a look.”

The dial of the watch showed the time as precisely 1:30. Hunsicker began to tremble.

The little man was amused. “You might as well get used to it.” He raised his thin eyebrows. “Unless you genuinely want no part of this. Opting out is usually the simplest thing to do in all human experiences, until of course the last one—at which time you however might well regret a long history of saying no in those situations in which you had a choice…. That's right: dying cannot be changed. You see why—it's never in the past. It's inevitably a thing of the future, is it not?”

Hunsicker sought refuge in banalities. For the first time he noticed the show windows of the shop whose doorway gave them shelter. Medical equipment was on display therein: bedpans, leg braces, trusses, all flyblown and dusty, the rubber tube of the enema gear looking brittle, the bulb half-deflated. The interior of the shop was unlighted and appeared deserted.

“Look,” he forced himself to say at last, “I'm certain there is an explanation for what I hope is your sleight-of-hand and not some nervous ailment or even worse on my part. But what I'll have to get used to, if so, will be stark realism and not some supernatural nonsense. If I'm sick I'll have to get treatment. Now I
must
go. I won't ask again how you know my first name. I'm not even going to inquire into your own identity. I don't want to get in any deeper!” He stepped to the junction of doorway and sidewalk.

“All right, then,” the little man said behind him. “I'll put things back where they were.”

The garment which Hunsicker wore was once again the wet trench coat.

The little man was smiling at him. “It's your business, surely, but I don't see why you couldn't try it for a while. You can always go back, as I have just demonstrated—incidentally, it's two twenty-five again. You're just as late as you ever were, as well as being just as damp. Do you really think that's preferable?”

“What I would prefer,” Hunsicker said in shaky resentment, “is being let alone. The normal sort of arrangement of things has always been good enough for me. I'm not the right sort of person to approach with an idea of this kind. You should get someone who lives an unsatisfactory life. This city must be full of them. Come to the office with me and choose almost anyone you see. But
I
can't do you much good. I've been happily married for almost thirty years to a woman who after discharging her responsibilities as a mother started her own business as a real-estate agent. I have a wonderful son. After a brilliant record at law school, he's now with a renowned firm of attorneys.”

“I'm aware of those facts,” said the little man. “They're not that remarkable nowadays, when almost everybody in your socioeconomic stratum could pretty well come up with the equivalent. Most middle-aged suburban wives sell real estate, don't they? And having intelligent and vigorous offspring is not unusual. Decadence is not as prevalent among the young as the journalists would have you think. Anyway, the other members of your family are not
you
. They have their own lives to deal with. As to yours, could it not stand some improvement? For example, what about your name? Is it really the one you'd want if you had your choice?”

As it happened, Walter Hunsicker had never much liked either of those names, and the middle, Grover, was no improvement. But he said now, defiantly, “It's a good name, a good strong solid three syllables, and it was my dad's, and I loved him.”

“Very touching,” said the little man, “but confess that if you could have changed it, no questions asked and no hard feelings, would you not have done so? What I'm talking about would be no betrayal of your forebears. Remember, it would be changing the past. Whatever new name you elected to take would thereupon
not
be new, but rather the one used by your family for generations. Now, what sounds good?”

It could do no harm to play this game, but, as he saw by his wristwatch, the time was now halfway to three. “Really, I must go.”

“Remember that it could be changed back again,” the little man said. “You've nothing to lose. Try some new names on for size!”

Hunsicker was shy. “I wouldn't know where to start. This is silly.”

“That's why you can't get hurt.”

“All right: Kellog. Channing Kellog the Third. No, that's pretentious. John Kellog, known except on formal documents as Jack.”

The little man nodded soberly. “So be it. You may need a whole new past to go with the name. Jack Kellog's not the name of someone your age who is chief copy-editor at a book-publishing firm, father of a son who has already gone beyond him in professional prestige.”

Hunsicker grimaced. He had been foolish to dally here. “Well then,” he said, “isn't it fortunate that I remain good old Walter Hunsicker?” He took the plunge into the rain.

Six blocks later, he reached his office, which was in a building that only from the exterior seemed a world of green glass. The receptionist was an amply proportioned young woman with auburn hair in an artificial friz, or so it seemed, for only last week it had been softly waved—unless the reverse was true and the tight little coils were natural, the waving manmade.

He nodded and said, “Judy.” He was the head of a department of some consequence, for no book however exalted could go to the printer without being copy-edited, and yet he knew the name of this young kid, whereas after at least four months on the job she hadn't the foggiest knowledge of his. He realized that his wife was quite right, he shouldn't be irked over such inconsequentialities, but he
was
.

In silently acknowledging the nod, Judy displayed the progress she had made in recent weeks. For at least three weeks after assuming the post, she had continued to ask, on his return from lunch, whom he wanted to see and on what matter. On the wall behind her were recessed shelves, glass-fronted and conspicuously locked, showing the bright jackets of books recently published by the firm. The manuscript for each had passed through Hunsicker's department and, he liked to think, had been greatly improved thereby, perhaps even made publishable: it would be astonishing to the lay reader to know how careless many authors, even some of the most renowned, are not only about grammar and of course spelling, but also the accuracy of their facts. Or maybe just stupid, for one truth Hunsicker had learned in his years of wielding a blue pencil was that it takes less intelligence to write a book than to put together a Christmas toy that comes disassembled. He could admit there were exceptions, but his was scarcely the kind of work that tended to preserve the awe one had felt for story-tellers as a bookish, hypochondriacal child.

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.”