Callahan grabs the railing of the footbridge and squeezes down tightly as a wave of dizziness courses through him, making him feel unsteady on his feet and unsure of his balance. The railing feels real enough, wood warmed by the sun and engraved with thousands of inter-locking initials and messages. He sees DKLMBin a heart. He sees FREDDY& HELENA= TRU LUV. He sees KILL ALL SPIX AND NIGERS, the message flanked by swastikas, and wonders at verbal depletion so complete the sufferer cannot even spell his favorite epithets. Messages of hate, messages of love, and all of them as real as the rapid beating of his heart or the weight of the few coins and bills in the right front pocket of his jeans. He takes a deep breath of the breeze, and that’s real, too, right down to the tang of diesel fuel.

This is happening to me, I know it is, he thinks. I am not in some psychiatric hospital’s Ward 9. I am me, I am here, and I’m even sober—at least for the time being—and New York is at my back. So is the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, with its uneasy dead. Before me is the weight of America, with all its possibilities.

This thought lifts him, and is followed by one that lifts him even higher: not just one America, perhaps, but a dozen…or a thousand…or a million. If that’s Leabrook over there instead of Fort Lee, maybe there’s another version of New Jersey where the town on the other side of the Hudson is Leeman or Leighman or Lee Bluffs or Lee Palisades or Leghorn Village. Maybe instead of forty-two continental United States on the other side of the Hudson, there are forty-two hundred, or forty-twothousand, all of them stacked in vertical geographies of chance.

And he understands instinctively that this is almost certainly true. He has stumbled upon a great, possibly endless, confluence of worlds. They are all America, but they are all different. There are highways which lead through them,and he can see them.

He walks rapidly to the Leabrook end of the footbridge, then pauses again.Suppose I can’t find my way back? he thinks. Suppose I get lost and wander and never find my way back to the America where Fort Lee is on the west side of the George Washington Bridge and Gerald Ford (of all people!) is the President of the United States?

And then he thinks:So what if I do? So fucking what?

When he steps off on the Jersey side of the footbridge he’s grinning, truly lighthearted for this first time since the day he presided over Danny Glick’s grave in the town of Jerusalem’s Lot. A couple of boys with fishing poles are walking toward him. “Would one of you young fellows care to welcome me to New Jersey?” Callahan asks, grinning more widely than ever.