Chapter 42

Publisher’s note:

Some time ago I had a series of e-mail exchanges with someone who had a username of j650411; no actual name was ever given, and I didn’t think about it much since something like that frequently happens. We had a number of brief discussions about current stories, and a few other things. They proved to be informative, enjoyable, and sometimes thought-provoking. The exchanges tailed off after a while, as they often do. I never heard any more until I received the manuscript of the story you have just read. With it was a cover note, “I would appreciate it if you were to publish this, but please let it wait a year in case I change my mind.”

I read the story, and will admit to doing some light editing, such as fixing a few obvious typos and fiddling with the punctuation in spots to suit my tastes. But, since I had a year to think about it, I thought about it a lot. I actually wound up holding it for longer than a year since I needed to think about it even more.

I think most of us, when we get to the age I am now, muse about what it would be like to go back to when we were young and do things all over again, knowing what we did not know on our first pass through. There is a whole genre of such “do-over” stories; some – not many – even involve a gender change along the way. Most of them are pretty fantastic, just dreams run wild of the things we would have liked to have done or ought to have done. Almost all of them involve using that carried-over knowledge to get rich or have lots of sex and power, and usually all three.

This story did not read like that. In fact, despite the fantastic thing Joan claims happened to her, this story has a ring of truth to it that I find hard to explain, except to say that some of the events Joan relates must really have happened. But none of them are the world-changing sort of things usually found in such stories.

I decided to wait out that year that had been requested, but during that period I got curious enough about the story to attempt to verify some of the details. It proved harder than I thought.

The reader will notice that Joan rarely uses a last name, especially not of anyone close to her, with only a few exceptions where the use of a last name would be required by formality. She never even hints at what her last name, single or married, might have been. In fact, it would not surprise me if she changed at least some and possibly all of the first names she uses, which by itself would make this a work of fiction – historical fiction, perhaps, but fiction containing at least a grain of truth and possibly much more.

Determining the degree of truth in her story has proven to be elusive, despite extensive searches on and off the Internet. Here and there it’s possible to pick up hints of a woman who may or may not have been Joan, but it’s difficult to say so with any degree of accuracy.

One of the few singular events that ought to pin her down is her claim to have climbed Mount Everest. Joan does not identify when she claimed to do it, but from internal evidence in the story it had to be in the early eighties. While hundreds have climbed it over the years, relatively few had accomplished it by then, so her accomplishment ought to be able to be picked out. But it’s not as easy as it first seems, as Joan comes right out and says she did it under an assumed name to sneak around registration restrictions, and she never tells us what that assumed name was. She may not have used that name on the mountain, and she tells us flat out that it never appeared in the record books.

Attempts to couple Joan with the small handful of people, man or woman, who are on the record as having climbed Everest in that period have mostly proven fruitless. It’s clear that they are not Joan, but that proves nothing. This is not surprising if the story she relates about the organization of the climb is in the least bit true – but it is true to the degree that there were some “international” expeditions during that period, although the records of the participants are suspect or lacking.

There is no Venable College, either, at least not one in the upper Midwest, where it is clear that Joe and Joan lived, and where Joan went to college. Attempts to find a hint of her at other colleges in the region are considerably more difficult than trying to verify her claim of topping Mount Everest.

I thought I had a good chance of at least tracking down her real name in Lancaster, Colorado, where she says she taught for two years. No such luck; the district consolidated with another one after a major fire thirty years ago in which most school records had been destroyed, so that proved to be a dead end, too.

I will just sum things up by saying that a year of looking mostly came up with dead ends – sometimes thought-provoking ones, but dead nevertheless.

And yet . . .

I may have met the woman who called herself Joan.

I spent a year in Vietnam in roughly the same time period Joan claims to have been there. I was in a signal battalion, and spent a couple of months doing a communications upgrade at Phan Loc. She got the details right as I remember them, including the legendary dustoff pilot called “Chainsaw,” although I never heard his last name and the incident she relates must have happened after I left the area.

During that period, I received a letter from my then-fiancée, telling me she was pregnant by another man, so was breaking it off with me. Needless to say, I was hurt, devastated and depressed as a result.

One of the guys in my detachment suggested that I talk to the Red Cross representative to see if I could get an emergency trip home to deal with the issue, although how I could have dealt with it and not killed someone was beyond me then and now. But I thought it would be good to just have someone to talk it out with, not just someone in my detachment, so I went to the Red Cross Canteen one afternoon, and there spent an hour talking with an intelligent-looking young woman who had plenty of empathy. She was small and slender, with long brunette hair that was just shy of being blonde. After all this time – nearly fifty years – I no longer have much more than a generic memory of her face, which was pretty. I also don’t remember her name, although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t JoJo. I do remember that it was good to just be able to talk to an understanding American woman.

I remember pouring my broken heart out to her, and she gave me some good advice: if what I had with my former fiancée wasn’t good enough to last out my year in Vietnam, was it worth the trouble anyway? If she were going to be that faithless, what would I be opening myself up for in the future? They were good questions, and got me to thinking that she had a point.

After a glass of orange Kool-Aid and a donut, I walked out of the place in a considerably better mood and never looked back. I did, however, still feel the pain of the knife wound in my back, so when I did finally get married I made as sure as I could that it was to a woman who was going to be faithful and loyal to me. So it has remained for over forty years, so thank you to that young donut dolly, whether she was Joan or JoJo or whoever she was. (And to Susan, if by some chance you read this, I still say “to hell with you.”)

Could I be the Gary that Joan refers to? I’m not ruling it out, although she must have heard similar stories, for I was not the only soldier in Vietnam who was dumped by a faithless girlfriend who couldn’t wait and who was more interested in the present than she was in the future. There was a lot of that going around in those days, especially among young people of draft age of both sexes who blamed us soldiers for the war.

Joan’s rants about the way Vietnam veterans were treated upon our return to what we referred to as “the World” sit well with me. Many of us were treated with hatred, fear, and disdain for heeding President Kennedy’s call, “Ask what you can do for your country.” Recently there have been events here and there to “welcome home” the veterans of Vietnam who were so ignored, mistreated, and abused for daring to do our duty. I personally appreciate the thought, even though such events are forty years too late to heal the wounds that were inflicted upon us.

But there were a few people back in those days who cared, not necessarily about the war but about the soldiers who fought it. So I thank “JoJo” and the other donut dollies, as well as USO workers and others, young women who dared to go against the grain of the day and do what sorely needed to be done. You ladies have not been honored enough. Thank you.

But that leads to the question of why Joan sent me the story you have just read. I run a very small publishing house as well as writing books under my own name. It is pure speculation, but let’s face it: I have a somewhat unusual name. It is pure speculation, but could it be possible that Joan ran across my name somewhere, remembered me, and decided I was a possible way to tell a story that she apparently wanted to tell? It’s possible, I suppose. I can think of other possibilities.

What happened to Joan after I received the manuscript? Again, I don’t know. There are hints, but that’s all there are.

I received the manuscript a month after the date of the EF5 tornado that hit between Oklahoma City and Amarillo. When I later checked the header information of the e-mail, something the user rarely sees unless they have to dig into it, I discovered that a special e-mail program had sent it. The server-based program would hold an e-mail for later delivery unless cancelled, so I have to assume that it was never cancelled – and that I received the manuscript because she could not or did not want to cancel it.

The more elusive Joan’s story became, the more interested I was in tracking it down. That finally led me to fly to Oklahoma City and drive the Interstate between there and Amarillo just to get it in mind, with special attention near the tornado’s track. I spent some time trying to find out what happened. The storm had caused a lot of destruction and devastation along its path, but after going through many police and other records I could find no reports of a truck being disabled or being hit by lightning, or of a death that occurred at that time or place. A state trooper who was nearby at the time did tell me the storm was “a whompin’ humdinger,” which is a pretty strong statement for an Oklahoman to make about a tornado considering the number of them that occur there.

A discontinuity? Maybe.

That trooper also told me that he’d found a car abandoned alongside the road in that general area. It was a rental car, a Nissan Sentra, and it appeared totally disabled. There was no hint of what happened to the person driving it, and with everything else that had happened nobody seemed to worry about it too much – the trooper speculated that the driver had hitched a ride away from the place when the car was disabled.

It took some searching with rental car companies to find out that the car had eventually been towed in. It had taken a huge lightning hit that had destroyed everything electronic in the vehicle beyond economical repair, and the car had been scrapped. Nobody ever bothered with things like fingerprints. The rental car agency still had the normal information about the renter – name, address, and so forth – but upon my investigation, that information led to a woman who had been dead for a couple of years. Her name was not Catherine, but that didn’t surprise me by now.

We know, or at least Joan tells us, that she used a false name on Mount Everest. She vaguely hints in one place that she also used some subterfuge at least one other time later in her life, so it’s possible she used a nom de guerre to rent the car. There is, of course, no proof it was Joan at all.

So did Joan get “taken up” again, if that is the term to use? Your guess is as good as mine.

In the story Joan comes up with three possible general explanations of what happened to her. On a superficial reading she seems to think that the most likely one is that the whole thing was a hallucination that Joe was enjoying. I don’t really agree with her and somehow I don’t think she did, either, if for no more reason than it covered too much time with too many details. On top of that, as I noted above, there is no hint of a truck taking a lightning strike at that time and place.

She also speculates that her story might not be her hallucination, but in the imagination of someone (or something) else. Philosophers have debated over the years the idea that we are all the figment of someone else’s imagination – perhaps God’s – but I have trouble buying it. There’s just too much there, too much detail. I could easily be wrong.

Her final speculation, that she went through a zigzag jump between timelines, does have some merit to it – but only some. As Joan herself said, “that bucket has a lot of leaks in it.”

The amount of power in a really big lightning bolt has some amazing and still-mysterious properties to it. Although it is possible to believe that these can even warp space and time, it seems rather unlikely to me, but I am a writer and a publisher, not a physicist. However, it can at least be speculated that a person could be picked up from one place and deposited in another place on a different timeline by natural forces that we don’t understand.

But to take a persona from one body and plant it in another? Even in the very unlikely event that moving between timelines is possible at all, moving between bodies seems to me to imply some sort of intelligent intervention. Joan’s experience seems to argue that it was something other than totally random or she would not have wound up in the same family she had in her first life. Joan seems to discount that, but after considerable contemplation I think she felt it was a strong possibility and was covering things up a little.

But who would provide that intelligent intervention? God? Aliens? Someone from the future, or another timeline? Something else we can’t comprehend? Don’t ask me – I’m just guessing on the basis of very thin evidence.

That leads us to the question of why an intelligent being of whatever nature would intervene in the first place. Again, I can do no more than speculate.

I started out thinking of the manuscript I received from Joan as fantasy – an interesting fantasy, but nothing more. In time, my thinking morphed into considering it as historical fiction written in the tone of an autobiography. Then one day it struck me that it could also be read as a sort of after-action report. Upon reading it, my wife said that to her it had the tone of a competently written “what I did on my summer vacation” essay.

That thought led me to wonder late one night if perhaps Joan’s half-century visit to this timeline could have been a training exercise, a live-action preparation for something else. It could be, I suppose, but it seems very unlikely. I don’t even want to think about the question of “preparation for what?” It’s beyond my limited comprehension.

Why did Joan send me the manuscript in the first place? Again, I can do nothing but speculate. It could be that she wrote the whole thing to sort things out in her own mind, or for a report to turn in for credit, and to a degree the story reads that way. Perhaps she wanted to leave some record, or perhaps she just did it on a whim. Who knows? I doubt if I ever will.

I know there are those who think that all fiction is fantasy and so is most fact, but I’ll leave it for some literature class to argue that one out. So I can’t tell you if this story is fact, fiction, or fantasy. It’s up to you as a reader to decide that one.

All I can say is that if Joan did get taken up from that Nissan Sentra west of Oklahoma City, I hope she’s enjoying herself in a place where she has a great mountain to climb, one that has a beautiful view from the top.