I seated myself in the wooden chair and thought of the classroom. I visualized Miss Ralston and her false teeth and the blackboard behind her that was gray with chalk dust. I found myself crossing my ankles again and there I was again at precisely the moment I had reentered the first time. Miss Ralston was reading the same things about Latin America. She called on Jack Mowbray to read, corrected his pronunciation of Bolivar. Knowing now what was going to happen to me and knowing, too, how trivial it really was, I felt calmer this time. I decided to try something. I tried to move my hand down to my lap and button my fly. Nothing happened. My hand remained gently resting on my desk. Jack went on reading. I concentrated on moving the hand. It moved about an inch and then lay still again. Jack finished reading and Miss Ralston called on Fawn Harrington to read. Fawn stood up—a beautiful, soft-voiced girl with long lashes—and read quietly. Concentrating, I made my mind picture my right hand lifting from the desk and settling into my lap and after a moment I realized with surprise that it now was in my lap. I began picturing my fingers fastening the buttons. It was slow and difficult, but I could feel it happening. I got them buttoned.

When the reading came to me I stood up and read a passage about the principal fuels of Latin America and then sat down. Miss Ralston had not spoken to me! She called on Toby Kavanaugh. Toby stood up, his open book close to his weak eyes, and began to read. And then I found myself back here in Limbo, sitting in my wooden chair. I was exultant, almost awed. I had changed the past!

Immediately I wondered if that change would provoke others further along. Would I be less shy and difficult with girls when I began to date them at seventeen? Would I make a better grade in Social Science, do better in college, get a better job when I graduated, and so on? Such changes might well prevent my death at fifty-one. Yet clearly I was still dead and nothing in Limbo had changed. It was the same as ever, such as it was.

I remembered my first job interview, in my twenties, when I had become frightened and couldn’t even remember my telephone number when the interviewer asked for it. Would erasing the incident of the unbuttoned fly have made me more confident in my twenties? I had invented a phone number for that man and he had ended the interview later, saying, “I’ll call you.”