He told his parents that he and a couple of his friends had been invited to another friend’s house on the Jersey shore, a lie so ornate and nonsensical that neither one of them saw through it, and when he left for school on the Friday in question, it seemed altogether appropriate that he should be carrying a small overnight bag with him. The plan was to leave for New York the instant school let out, and if he was lucky enough to catch the first bus, he would be at Amy’s apartment by four-thirty or a quarter to five, and if he missed the first bus and had to take the second, by five-thirty or a quarter to six. Another dull day in the corridors and classrooms of Montclair High School, concentrating on the clock as if he could will time forward by the sheer power of his thoughts, counting the minutes, counting the hours, and then, in the early afternoon, the announcement over the public address system that the president had been shot in Dallas, followed by another announcement sometime later that President Kennedy was dead.
Within minutes, all activities at the school came to a halt. Handkerchiefs and tissues appeared in a thousand pairs of hands, mascara was running down the cheeks of sobbing girls, boys walked around shaking their heads or punching the air with their fists, girls were hugging, boys and girls were hugging, teachers were sobbing and hugging while others looked blankly at walls and doorknobs, and before long students were massing in the gym and cafeteria, no one had any idea what to do, no one was in charge, all feuds and animosities had stopped, there were no enemies anymore, and then the principal’s voice came over the public address system again and announced that school was dismissed, that everyone could go home.
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.”