4 3 2 1

  The man of the future was dead.

  Unreal city.

  Everyone was going home, but Ferguson was carrying his overnight bag and walking to the Montclair bus stop to wait for the New York bus. He would call his parents later, but he wasn’t going home. He needed to be by himself for a while, and then he needed to be with Amy, and he would stay with her as planned throughout the weekend.

  Two roads diverged in an unreal city, and the future was dead.

  Waiting for the bus, then mounting the steps of the bus and looking for a seat, sitting down in the fifth row and then listening to the gears shift as the bus pulled away and headed for New York, then riding through the tunnel as a woman sobbed in the seat behind him and the driver talked to a passenger up front, I can’t believe it, I can’t fucking believe it, but Ferguson believed it, even though he felt entirely removed from himself, floating somewhere just outside his body, but at the same time clear in his head, altogether lucid, with no inclination to break down and cry, no, all this was too big for that, let the woman behind him sob her heart out, it probably made her feel better, but he would never feel better and therefore he didn’t have the right to cry, he only had the right to think, to try to understand what was happening, this big thing that resembled nothing else that had ever happened to him. The man talking to the driver said: It reminds me of Pearl Harbor. You know, everything all calm and quiet, a lazy Sunday morning, people hanging around the house in their pajamas, and then BANG, the world explodes, and suddenly we’re at war. Not a bad comparison, Ferguson thought. The big event that rips through the heart of things and changes life for everyone, the unforgettable moment when something ends and something else begins. Was that what this was, he asked himself, a moment similar to the outbreak of war? No, not quite. War announces the beginning of a new reality, but nothing had begun today, a reality had ended, that was all, something had been subtracted from the world, and now there was a hole, a nothing where there had once been a something, as if every tree in the world had vanished, as if the very concept of tree or mountain or moon had been erased from the human mind.

  A sky without a moon.

  A world without trees.

  The bus pulled into the terminal at Fortieth Street and Eighth Avenue. Rather than walk through the underground passageways to Seventh Avenue as he normally did on his trips to New York, Ferguson climbed the stairs and went out into the late November twilight, walking east along Forty-second Street as he headed toward his subway stop at Times Square, one more body in the early rush-hour crowd, the dead faces of people going about their business, everything the same, everything different, and then he found himself pushing his way through clusters of motionless pedestrians gathered on the pavement, all of them looking up at the stream of illuminated type circling the tall building in front of them, JFK SHOT AND KILLED IN DALLAS—JOHNSON SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT, and just before he reached the steps that would take him down to the IRT subway platform, he heard a woman say to another woman, I can’t believe it, Dorothy, I just can’t believe what my eyes are seeing.

  Unreal.

  A city without trees. A world without trees.

  He hadn’t called Amy to find out if she had come home from school. It was possible that she was still with her friends, swept up in the confusion of the moment, overwrought, too shaken to have remembered that he was coming, and so when he pushed the buzzer of Apartment 4B, it was unclear to him whether anyone would answer. Five seconds of doubt, ten seconds of doubt, and then he heard her voice talking to him through the intercom, Archie, is that you, Archie?, and a moment later she buzzed him in.

  They spent several hours watching the coverage of the assassination on TV, and then, with their arms wrapped around each other in a tight embrace, they stumbled into Amy’s room, lowered themselves onto the bed, and made love for the first time.

  2.2

  The first issue of the Cobble Road Crusader appeared on January 13, 1958. A. Ferguson, the founder and publisher of the infant newspaper, announced in a front-page editorial that the Crusader would “report the facts to the best of our ability and tell the truth no matter what the cost.” The printing of the inaugural edition of fifty copies was overseen by production manager Rose Ferguson, who took the original handwritten dummy to Myerson’s Print Shop in West Orange to execute the task of reproducing both sides of the twenty-four-by-thirty-six-inch sheet and turning out facsimiles on paper thin enough to be folded in half, and because of that fold, the Crusader entered the world looking more like a genuine news organ (almost) than some homemade, typewritten, mimeographed newsletter. Five cents a copy. No photographs or drawings, some breathing room up top for the stenciled masthead, but otherwise nothing beyond two large rectangles filled with eight columns of densely packed hand-printed words, the penmanship of an almost-eleven-year-old boy who had always struggled to form his letters neatly, but in spite of some wobbles and misalignments, the results were legible enough, with an overall design that came across as a sincere if somewhat demented version of an eighteenth-century broadsheet.

  The twenty-one articles ranged from four-line squibs to two three-column features, the first of which was the lead story on the front page, with a headline that read, A HUMAN TRAGEDY. DODGERS AND GIANTS LEAVE N.Y. FOR WEST COAST, and included extracts from interviews Ferguson had conducted with various family members and friends, the most dramatic response coming from fellow fifth-grader Tommy Fuchs: “I feel like killing myself. The only team left is the Yankees, and I hate the Yankees. What am I supposed to do?” The feature on the back explored a developing scandal at Ferguson’s elementary school. Four times in the past six weeks, students had crashed into one of two brick walls in the gym during dodgeball games, causing an outbreak of black eyes, concussions, and bleeding scalps and foreheads, and Ferguson was agitating for pads to be installed to prevent further injuries. After eliciting comments from the recent victims (“I was going after the ball,” said one, “and before I knew it I was bouncing off the bricks with a bashed-in head”), Ferguson spoke to the principal, Mr. Jameson, who agreed that the situation was out of control. “I have spoken to the Board of Education,” he said, “and they’ve promised to pad the walls by the end of the month. Until then—no more dodgeball.”

  Vanishing baseball teams and preventable head injuries, but also stories about missing pets, storm-damaged utility poles, traffic accidents, spitball contests, Sputnik, and the state of the president’s health, as well as brief notices about the current doings of the Ferguson and Adler clans, such as STORK BEATS DEADLINE!: “For the first time in human history, a baby was born on its due date. At 11:53 P.M. on December 29, just seven minutes before the clock ran out on her, Mrs. Frances Hollander, 22, of New York City, gave birth to her first child, a 7 pound, 3 ounce boy named Stephen. Congratulations, cousin Francie!” Or, A BIG STEP UP: “Mildred Adler was recently promoted from associate professor to full professor by the English Department at the University of Chicago. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Victorian novel and has published books about George Eliot and Charles Dickens.” And then, not to be overlooked, there was a boxed-in rectangle in the lower right-hand quadrant of the back page that bore the title Adler’s Joke Corner, which Ferguson planned to include as a regular feature in all issues of the Crusader, for how could he neglect a resource as valuable as his grandfather, the king of the bad joke, who had told so many bad jokes to Ferguson over the years that the young editor in chief would have felt remiss if he hadn’t used some of them. The first example went as follows: “Mr. and Mrs. Hooper were on their way to Hawaii. Just before the plane landed, Mr. Hooper asked his wife if the correct pronunciation of the word Hawaii was Hawaii—with a w sound—or Havaii—with a v sound. ‘I don’t know,’ Mrs. Hooper said. ‘Let’s ask someone when we get there.’ In the airport, they spotted a little old man walking by in a Hawaiian shirt. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Mr. Hooper said. ‘Can you tell us if we’re in Hawaii or Havaii?’ Without a blink of hesitation, the old
man said, ‘Havaii.’ ‘Thank you,’ said Mr. and Mrs. Hooper. To which the old man replied: ‘You’re velcome.’”

  Subsequent issues were published in April and September of that year, each one an improvement on the last, or so Ferguson was told by his parents and relatives, but with his school friends it was a different story, for after the success of the first issue, which had taken his class by storm, a number of resentments and animosities began to surface. The closed-in world of fifth- and sixth-grade life was bound by a strict set of rules and social hierarchies, and by taking the initiative to launch the Cobble Road Crusader, that is, by daring to create something out of nothing, Ferguson had inadvertently overstepped those bounds. Inside those bounds boys could win status in one of two ways: by excelling at sports or by proving themselves to be masters of mischief-making. Good marks in school were of little importance, and even exceptional talent in art or music counted for almost nothing, since those talents were seen as inborn gifts, biological traits similar to the color of one’s hair or the size of one’s feet, and therefore not fully connected to the person who possessed them, mere facts of nature independent of human will. Ferguson had always been reasonably good at sports, which had allowed him to fit in with the other boys and avoid the dreaded fate of outcast. Mischief-making bored him, but his anarchic sense of humor had helped to cement his reputation as a decent fellow, even if he kept his distance from the wild, strutting boys who spent their weekends dropping cherry bombs into mailboxes, shattering lampposts, and making obscene phone calls to the prettiest girls in the grade above them. In other words, Ferguson had breezed along so far without running into excessive difficulties, his good grades considered neither a plus nor a minus, his tactful, unaggressive approach to interpersonal relations having buffered him against the angers of other boys, which meant that he had been in few fistfights and seemed to have made no permanent enemies, but then, in the months before he turned eleven, he decided he wanted to make a splash, which expressed itself in the form of a self-published, one-sheet newspaper, and suddenly his classmates understood that there was more to Ferguson than they had suspected, that he was really quite a clever young man, a crackerjack boy with the strength of mind to pull off an intricate stunt like the Crusader, and therefore all twenty-two fellow members of his fifth-grade class coughed up their nickels for a copy of the first issue, congratulating him on his fine work, laughing at the funny turns of phrase that dotted his articles, and then the weekend came and by Monday morning everyone had stopped talking about it. If the Crusader had ended after that first issue, Ferguson would have spared himself the grief that ultimately fell upon his head, but how could he have known there was a difference between being clever and too clever, that a second issue in the spring would start turning some of the class against him because it would prove that he was working too hard, too hard as opposed to their not hard enough, meaning that Ferguson was an industrious go-getter and they were little more than lazy, good-for-nothing louts? The girls were still with him, every one of the girls, but the girls weren’t competing with him, it was the boys who were beginning to feel the pressure of Ferguson’s diligence, three or four of them in any case, but Ferguson was too filled with his own happiness to notice, too flush with the triumph of completing another issue to question why Ronny Krolik and his band of hoodlums refused to buy the new edition of the Crusader when he brought it to school in April, thinking, if he thought about it at all, that they simply didn’t have enough money.

  In Ferguson’s opinion, newspapers were one of mankind’s greatest inventions, and he had loved them ever since he had learned how to read. Early in the morning, seven days a week, a copy of the Newark Star-Ledger would appear on the front steps of the house, landing with a pleasant thump just as he was climbing out of bed, thrown by some nameless, invisible person who never missed his mark, and by the time he was six and a half Ferguson had already begun to take part in the morning ritual of reading the paper while he ate his breakfast, he who had willed himself to read during the summer of the broken leg, who had fought his way out of the prison of his childish stupidity and turned into a young citizen of the world, now advanced enough to comprehend everything, or almost everything but abstruse matters of economic policy and the notion that building more nuclear weapons would ensure a lasting peace, and every morning he would sit at the breakfast table with his parents as each one of them tackled a different section of the paper, reading in silence because talking was so difficult that early in the morning, and then passing around completed sections from one to the other in a kitchen filled with the smells of coffee and scrambled eggs, of bread warming and browning in the toaster, of butter melting into hot slabs of toast. For Ferguson, it was always the funnies and sports to begin with, the oddly appealing Nancy and her friend Sluggo, Jiggs and his wife Maggie, Blondie and Dagwood, Beetle Bailey, followed by the latest from Mantle and Ford, from Conerly and Gifford, and then on to the local news, the national and international news, articles about movies and plays, so-called human interest stories about the seventeen college boys who crammed into a telephone booth or the thirty-six hot dogs consumed by the winner of the Essex County eating contest, and when all those had been exhausted and there were still a few minutes to spare before he set off to school, the classified ads and personals. Darling, I love you. Please come home.

  The appeal of newspapers was altogether different from the appeal of books. Books were solid and permanent, and newspapers were flimsy, ephemeral throwaways, discarded the instant after they had been read, to be replaced by another one the next morning, every morning a fresh paper for the new day. Books moved forward in a straight line from beginning to end, whereas newspapers were always in several places at once, a hodgepodge of simultaneity and contradiction, with multiple stories coexisting on the same page, each one exposing a different aspect of the world, each one asserting an idea or a fact that had nothing to do with the one that stood beside it, a war on the right, an egg-and-spoon race on the left, a burning building at the top, a Girl Scout reunion at the bottom, big things and small things mixed together, tragic things on page 1 and frivolous things on page 4, winter floods and police investigations, scientific discoveries and dessert recipes, deaths and births, advice to the lovelorn and crossword puzzles, touchdown passes and debates in Congress, cyclones and symphonies, labor strikes and transatlantic balloon voyages, the morning paper necessarily had to include each one of those events in its columns of black, smudgy ink, and every morning Ferguson exulted in the messiness of it all, for that was what the world was, he felt, a big, churning mess, with millions of different things happening in it at the same time.

  That was what the Crusader represented for him: a chance to create his own mess of a world in something that looked like a legitimate paper. Not truly legitimate, of course, no more than a rough approximation at best, but his young boy’s amateur version of the real thing was close enough in spirit to make an impression on his friends. Ferguson had been hoping for that kind of response, he had wanted to turn heads and make the class notice him, and now that his wish had been granted, he plunged into the second issue with an ever-growing sense of confidence, a new faith in the power of his own genius, and so blind had that faith become that not even the partial boycott by Krolik and his pals could make him see what was happening. It wasn’t until the next morning that his eyes began to open somewhat. Michael Timmerman was one of his closest friends, a smart and popular boy whose grades were even better than Ferguson’s, a quasi-heroic figure who towered over evil midgets like Ronny Krolik in the way an oak towered over a patch of poison ivy, and when Michael Timmerman pulled you aside on the playground before school and said he wanted to talk, you were more than happy to listen to him. His first words were all about how good he thought the Crusader was, which pleased Ferguson enormously, since the opinion of the top athlete and scholar in the class weighed more than anyone else’s opinion, but then Timmerman went on to say he would like to work with Ferguson, that he wanted t
o join the staff of the Crusader and contribute articles himself, which would make a good publication even better, he felt, for who had ever heard of a one-man newspaper, there was something weird and rinky-dink about having one reporter write all the articles, and if Ferguson gave him a chance and things worked out well, maybe there could eventually be three or four or five reporters, and if everyone chipped in some money to help with the printing costs, maybe the Crusader could expand to four pages or eight pages, with everything set in type instead of depending on Ferguson’s atrocious handwriting, and just like that it would start to look like a real paper.

  Ferguson was not prepared for any of this. The Crusader had always been intended as a one-man show, his show, for better or worse his show and no one else’s, and the idea of sharing the stage with another boy, much less several other boys, made him ill with unhappiness. Timmerman was smothering him with his comments and suggestions, trying to strong-arm him into ceding control of his rinky-dink rag with its atrocious hand-printed letters, but didn’t Timmerman realize that he had already thought about those things, that even if he had known how to type he wouldn’t have used a typewriter because the look would have been wrong, and because he couldn’t afford to pay a printer, owing to the fact that he was eleven years old, he had opted for handwriting instead, and what did Timmerman know about his mother’s deal with Myerson to give a discount on portraits of his three children in exchange for the use of his printing equipment to run off the facsimiles, that was how things worked, he wanted to tell Timmerman, you bartered to cut down costs and did the best with what you had, and forget about chipping in to produce a so-called real paper, no five boys could ever raise enough money to afford that expense, and if Timmerman had been anyone other than his most admired friend, Ferguson would have told him to butt out of his business and start his own paper if he had so many bright ideas, but he respected Timmerman too much to speak his mind, he didn’t want to risk insulting his friend, and so he took the coward’s way out and hedged his bets, saying Let me think about it instead of giving a clear yes or no, hoping time would dull Timmerman’s newfound passion for journalism and that the matter would be forgotten in a couple of days.