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This is how much better Susannah's shot-in-the-head husband is: he went to a meeting with his publisher today. Now, all cards on the table, he did not fly himself down to the city, as he is fond of doing; Calyx sent someone up to Castle Rock. Eddie met him at Dud's, a terrible greasy hole of a bar which Eddie insists has the best burgers in town (no), and now they are snowed in, since at about ten am it decided to start snowing and shows no intention of stopping short of the next Superbowl.

This would be fine, and in fact slightly hilarious (she told him just to have the publisher over to the house), except no one has been doing any shopping. Eddie was supposed to bring her back one of those (nasty) burgers. Three hours ago.

Susannah has a bowl of chili (paid for with Mastercard, along with her tab) and an old-style Coke float. You can't get the ice cream anymore; and for that matter, in Eddie Toren's world, you can't get the Coke. Good deal, overall.

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Everybody gets into hunting somehow.

"Ways to cope with that," Bobby says, and lifts his bottle again. "Gets rough till you figure 'em out, though."

"My husband," she says, "is something of a saint. In some ways."

"As far as he's concerned I appeared out of thin air on Christmas Eve, 1988. And that's enough for him."

"Smart man, to know a good thing when he sees it." And he's careful to make that sound respectful. "And I guess the time of year didn't hurt so much with that, neither."

"I've always found fate to have a funny sense of timing." It was Christmas twenty years later when all this broke loose. She doesn't take Eddie's survival as a given; she takes it as a warning shot. Game on.

She offers her hand, now. "Susannah. Toren." She's had twenty years of carrying his name, but it still feels strange, using it in Milliways.

Edited 2008-02-23 17:21 (UTC)

Bobby reaches over and shakes; his hand is rough, callused, strong. "Bobby." And a quick grin. "Singer. Pleased, ma'am."

"It's mutual. Always glad to meet someone who can appreciate Dylan." She has a little bit of her chili, and leaves the next move to him.

(Here's a man who understands about a past that needs to be kept buried. In a crossroad with a stake in its heart, for preference. A man who, like her these twenty years, doesn't ask many personal questions, because they invite personal questions that are hard to answer. She's opened up a little, because this is a familiar, relaxed place for her; a free zone. It's not that way for him, and he hasn't.)

You need to watch what you bury at the crossroads. If you don't know what you're doing, chances are you're gonna conjure up something you can't handle.

(No such thing as a free zone. You carry your baggage with you.)

"Sixty-three to eighty-nine," he says, ruminatively. "And you're saying you did a little research. Was it as much of a zoo there as it was here?"

'Here' is a slippery idea, but she lets it slide. "Pretty close. The names change, but the shape of events stay pretty close. I like to think the good guys got a little more done where I am now, but maybe that's wishful thinking."

She has a bite of chili. "No Nixon presidency. There is that."

"...then I guess the good guys did get a little more done. Seeing as Nixon wouldn't count so much in anybody's book as one of the good ones."

She grins at that. "He lost to Adlai Stevenson over the money scandal--no Checkers, in my husband's world. And then he just never got his shot again."

"Amazing the difference a dog can make."

"What's that rhyme -- the one about the horseshoe." Bobby squints a little. "Except that was England."

"For the want of a nail," she says, nodding. "My mother used to like that one."

"Devil's in the details. Longer way of saying it." His bottle's almost empty, and he figures it's probably a good idea not to go for another. "All the states still the same?"

"Still fifty," she says. "It makes a good pattern. But Hawaii got grouped in with Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Puerto Rico as the Island Territories. And they added Cuba and Hati, eventually."

"Doesn't make a lick of sense, but they aren't much more difference than New York City and upstate, I suppose, and it gives them some more heft, federally."

"Maybe," Bobby says, doubtfully, "but they're all the way out in the middle of nowhere -- don't that make them even worse off than your so-called flyover country?"

"Sure," she says. "And it would make a lot more sense for Cuba and Haiti to be folded into Florida--the demographics would work out a lot better, for one thing. But I guess they're better of than Hawaii would be on its own."

"And it ain't like the government ever had much sense to begin with." Time to polish off that beer.

"There's no doubt about that," she agrees. "Cuba was pretty bad, I guess--we got out of Vietnam early, but they get you one way or another. Haiti was half humanitarian aid, and half a base to keep an eye on the Communists in South America."

A beat. "I don't know that you care about all this, sorry."

Edited 2008-02-23 19:38 (UTC)

"Guess you could call me an armchair scholar."

Bobby's smile is -- kindly. Genuinely so.

"Wouldn't've asked if there wasn't somethin' I wanted to know in it. See how... off we might be, maybe."

"There's a world where they talk about it as being like a harp--each world, or version of a person, being strings on a harp. The ones close together sound a lot alike, and the ones farther apart... don't, so much. Still one harp, though."

Edited 2008-02-23 20:02 (UTC)

Bobby's glance sharpens a little. "How far does that extend, so much? You think it's accurate?"

"I'm not sure," she says. "It's not my metaphor--not even my language. But I've seen people from a lot of different Earths--worlds where there's a whole culture of people who can do magic, or where there are superheroes in spandex and capes. I've seen three or four different and contradictory pictures of the far future."

"Worlds where there was an apocalypse or a plague or a zombie outbreak; where the note is out of tune, or the string just plain snapped."

"And worlds that don't seem to have anything in common, on the surface, with the world I know, but still have funny... resonances. I think it's a pretty good metaphor."

This is the part where Eddie--either one--would say, I metaphor sex, but...

Edited 2008-02-23 20:45 (UTC)

"So any world's got something... bad," Bobby says, as though trying to understand, to comprehend, "is where something..."

Or doors to hell.

"Yeah."

"Where I take issue with it," as though he never trailed off, "is how you're supposed to classify the strings that sound lower than the others. Because what's the point of a harp where it all sounds the same?"

"Well, that's what I mean by differences," she says. "By--different scales of differences. An America with Nozz-a-la instead of Coke is just two strings side by side. An America with superheroes and without--they might be on opposite ends. One low and one high, although I don't know which would be which."

"That's not the same as being out of tune, if you see what I mean?"

"I think I'm getting at it, yeah." Doesn't mean he thinks it's a neat way to look at it -- it's not a perfect metaphor -- but it works.

"So your two -- they're in the middle, and pretty cozy, is what you're getting at?"