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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 Gra
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 pass, the way his amnesia is passing.” 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 assassination of President Ke
One night while Sadie and I were watching Combat, I remembered what I had done to Frank Du
“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 Ke
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 assassin’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 assassin 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 assassins. He says both the right-wingers from Dallas–Fort Worth and the left-wingers from San Antonio are trying to scare Ke
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 Du
“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!”