As it turned out, just where to find him was a traffic stop on the other side of town. Neither Jean nor Paul had a car, so they caught a cab together from Pence Library, and as they were getting into the back Paul told the driver, "Corner of Karn and Washington, I think, in Belhurst."
The driver didn't question him, but Jean did. "You think? Don't you know where he lives?"
"Oh, he doesn't live there." Paul was looking down at his wristwatch.
"So…," Jean prompted, feeling annoyed at having to ask for clarification.
"So, we'll just find him there. If we get there on time." He knew he was confusing her, but he only looked at her and grinned, so she decided not to give him the satisfaction of asking.
It felt strange – barring the fact that she was sitting in a cab now with Paul McCartney, which was already strange – to be in a cab at all, watching downtown fade out into actual neighborhoods outside the window. She had only moved in a week ago, but she hadn't thought about how in that time she hadn't once left campus, hadn't seen any of the rest of the city. It was disappointing in some ways as they left behind them the old architecture and sprawling lawns of campus and the clustered cafes and shops of downtown, only to be replaced by a land of strip malls and near-uniform neighborhoods, but it was also somewhat refreshing. Calming. It looked more like the area Jean was from, Ajax, about forty minutes outside of Cavern, and there weren't so many college kids.
"Did you live around here?" she asked Paul absently, still looking out the window.
"Yeah," he said after a moment. God, that accent. It was too much. "Moved here when I was fifteen."
"From Liverpool?"
"Yep."
She hadn't thought about that – how he'd gotten here. If Paul was alive, now, in the twenty-first century, and so was George – assuming it was really George – did that mean John and Ringo were, too? And if they were, what if they were still in Liverpool? Why the hell weren't Paul and George in Liverpool? If they were going to reappear somewhere in the world as teenagers, she would have thought it would be there.
"Why'd you move?" she asked.
"My dad got a new job. I didn't mind it really, though, 'cause I met George."
"Plus all the girls here dig your accent," she said, without really meaning to.
He laughed. "How'd you know that?"
She shrugged. She could have guessed that even if she hadn't known who he was.
The cab started to pull over, just as Paul spotted a bus approaching them from the other side of the street. Cavern County Public Schools was painted on the side in black block letters, along with the number 910.
"Hey, that's it!" he exclaimed, unbuckling in a hurry. "That's the one!" He pushed open the door and got out without paying, so Jean rolled her eyes, thanked the cabdriver, and gave him a twenty before following.
The intersection was not a busy one; they had entered a residential neighborhood, and there were few other cars around as the bright yellow bus pulled to a stop at the sign. The doors folded open, and a handful of kids spilled out, mostly elementary kids and a few who looked older. Not one of them was familiar, and Jean glanced over to Paul in confusion, but he wasn't looking at her. He was jogging over to the bus, and as soon as the last kid was off, he headed up the steps, gesturing at the last second for Jean to follow.
Following Paul up the steps, it took Jean a moment to realize what was going on. She looked over the rows of seats and saw no one who looked remotely like George Harrison, and then next to her she heard Paul saying, "Hallo, George!" so she turned around, and there he was.
In the driver's seat.
He didn't look old enough to be a bus driver; he barely even looked old enough to be a senior in high school. His hair was dark, the same shade as Paul's, and short – shorter than she was used to seeing it in photographs. He was grinning widely – his mouth had a way of stretching for length, of going for the biggest possible smile while somehow still seeming perfectly natural – and he got up from the seat for a moment to clap Paul on the back by way of greeting.
"Wasn't expecting to find you here," he said.
His accent, just like Paul's, was unmistakable. Dana used to make fun of it sometimes, saying it always sounded like he had something taking up space in his mouth, but Cassie liked it, and so did Jean.
"Hi, Paul!" chorused a few of the kids on the bus. Jean gave up and knitted her eyebrows together, staring at all of them with open disbelief on her face.
"Who's this?" asked George, looking at Jean.
"This is Jean–"
"Jean Carlisle," said Jean, barely even hearing Paul. "I'm in Paul's politics class."
"Ah, politics," said George, reaching over to shift a lever and bringing the bus into gear. The bus began pulling away from the intersection and continuing on through the neighborhood, and Jean had to grip the first pleather seat with one hand to keep her balance. "And here I told him that wouldn't be any fun."
"You're – sorry – you're a bus driver?" At least in this case her confusion was somewhat credible. She couldn't walk onto a bus full of people and say, You're a musical legend, how are you alive? but she could definitely say, You're a sixteen-year-old kid, how are you driving a school bus?
"Ah, not if the administration asks," said Paul, grinning.
"What's that mean?"
"Well, George here wasn't having such a great time at school – and Bernie, the old bus driver, wasn't having such a great time driving the bus every day. So they worked out a deal this year," Paul explained. "Most days – whenever George isn't up for class – he drives the bus himself. That way his folks think he's at school, Bernie gets paid, and George here has got himself a vehicle."
"Gas all paid for, too," George added. "I'm living the dream, really."
"That's…" Jean blinked. "That's actually really smart."
"George is really smart," Paul said proudly. "He just got some awful teachers, is all. Otherwise he'd be over at Mensa, wouldn't you, George?"
"Sod off."
"He's touchy about his genius," Paul told Jean confidentially. She had never heard anything about George Harrison being a genius, but he didn't particularly seem to agree with Paul anyway, so she decided to go along with it.
George turned a corner sharply, so sharply that several of the kids were abruptly shifted down where they sat. Jean was holding onto one of the seats, but Paul was thrown into the empty row he had been standing next to, disappearing behind the pleather and then reappearing a moment later with a look of mock annoyance on his face. The kids in the first few rows burst out laughing.
"Sorry," said George, "did I get you there?"
"Sod off."
"He's touchy about my bus driving skills," George told Jean.
He pulled over again and pushed down the lever to open the bus doors, and a bigger trail of kids dismounted, leaving only five or six left on the bus.
"So," said George as they pulled away from the curb, "did you all just come to say hi?"
"Wanted to introduce you to Jean," said Paul. "Isn't she great?"
"Oh yes," said George, "it's been a grand thirty seconds. I'm George Harrison, by the way," he added to Jean, as though that was a sentence that could ever end reasonably with by the way.
"It's nice to meet you," she said weakly.
"Can we go to your house when you're done?" Paul asked George.
"Sure."
It only took him around fifteen minutes to drop off the rest of the kids. It turned out he had something of a habit of taking sharp turns every once in a while or speeding over speed bumps, just to make the kids laugh, but he was actually a very good driver when he wasn't messing around. On the main roads when other cars were around he would go slowly, almost to the point that Jean would get impatient.
Once the last kids had gotten off, saying goodbye to George and Paul and Jean on their way out, Paul asked if he could drive, and George let him and started trying to climb on top of the rows of seat backs. Lying down, he was tall enough to balance his body over three seats, and Jean thought it looked fun, so she climbed on top of the seats on the other side of the aisle to try. Paul flicked through a few radio stations before miraculously finding one that was playing music, and the music was pretty shitty and kept crackling in and out, but he turned it up to blasting volume anyway and started to drive faster, trying to throw George and Jean off the tops of the seats at every corner. The most he succeeded in doing was rolling them around, but they always managed to catch themselves before they fell, until he braked very suddenly at a stop sign and they were both sent tumbling down to sprawl across the seats and the floor of the bus. It was a wonder they didn't ever get pulled over.
By the time they pulled up in front of George's house, all three of them were laughing, and Jean had gotten so used to the blaring music that the air around them felt suddenly voided as soon as Paul turned the bus off.
They parked the bus right in George's driveway. "I think you caught my arm pretty well on that last one," George told Paul as they got out.
"It was retribution," Paul said. "Throwing me into that seat before, it banged my spine a little."
"Funny, I didn't know you had a spine."
Paul reached over to thwack him, and George dodged it just in time.
Rather than walking over to the front door of his house, he unlocked the side door by the drive, a thin white wooden door with a screen in front of it. Then he walked in, kicking his shoes off in the entry, and Paul and Jean followed.
George's house was small but not cramped; in ways, it kind of reminded Jean of her own family's house. Knotted cloth rugs lay over the wooden floors of narrow hallways, and there were a few cheap framed paintings on the walls. He led them past the bathroom and a room that looked like the kitchen, up a steep flight of stairs, and into his own room. It was square with a low, slanted ceiling – the roof of this house; this must have been the attic – and the walls were papered with musical icons spanning the last century. Most of them were old; the grandeur of the music industry had been fading out pretty steadily over the last couple of decades, and it was no secret that society had largely lost its enthusiasm for it. George's taste apparently went way back; he had posters of Chuck Berry, Woody Guthrie, Janis Joplin, Carl Perkins, Eric Clapton, and – by far the most featured person on his wall – Bob Dylan.
"Subversive," Jean commented. It was hard to find places where posters like these were even sold anymore, and here George's room was covered with them. She felt calm for the most part, but confusion kept building and multiplying inside her. So Bob Dylan had really happened, Janis Joplin had really happened. Where did the Beatles fit in, if not on this wall?
"Georgie? Never," said Paul.
"You're a Dylan fan?" she asked George.
His facial expression didn't change, but his tone of voice conveyed mild surprise. "Are you?"
She shrugged. "I just know a couple songs. 'Like a Rolling Stone,' 'Mr. Tambourine Man.' My mom's a pretty big fan." She was starting to wish she'd listened to Cassie a little more as a kid, gleaned a little more knowledge.
"He was a genius," said George, with a reverence in his voice she hadn't heard from him yet. His eyes seemed suddenly engaged; she hadn't even realized that they were disengaged before, until now. "I mean, if you just listen to the lyrics, it's poetry–"
"Ah, don't get him riled up about Dylan," Paul broke in, "we'll never get out of here. Listen, speaking of music," he said, "Jeanie's got a bombshell for us, George." He flopped back to sit on George's bed, just as George sat down on the floor. Feeling too tall now in the small room, Jean followed suit.
George was watching her expectantly. Suddenly she didn't want to say anything, didn't want to tell him. Even though she had only met him half an hour ago, something about George struck her as a little more grounded than Paul – maybe in his composure, or the way his facial expression rarely changed unless he was actually affected by something. He seemed like he was of this world, like he made sense, and even more, like he was thinking things about the world that she would never have a chance to know unless he spoke them aloud. He was going to think she had lost it – hell, even she sort of felt like she had lost it.
"It's going to sound weird," she said.
"I'm listening," said George.
"He's all ears," put in Paul.
George shot him a look but offered no other response. Jean tried not to smile; George's ears were kind of big, and she got the feeling this wasn't the first time Paul had made that joke.
"Well…," Jean started carefully. Her eyes flicked away from George and down into her lap, but then it didn't feel right not to be looking at him when she said it, so she looked back up again. "Nobody else seems to know or remember – including you, I guess – but you're…" She tried to think of a good way to say it, and her gaze landed again on George's wall, on the posters. "You belong on that wall."
George raised his eyebrows. "In my dreams, maybe. Is that all?"
"No, I mean – I mean actually. You're George Harrison. You were in a band called the Beatles, in the sixties, with Paul here and two other guys. You were hugely successful – you were from England, but you came to America eventually, you went everywhere, all around the world. I don't know what happened, but up until a few hours ago, everybody knew who guys were. Everybody."
George stared at her.
Paul was grinning. "Isn't it good?" he asked George, as though Jean had just told a funny joke.
"I'm not messing around," said Jean desperately. "I'm serious. Paul, you don't believe me?"
He shrugged, looking away from her now. "I mean, she did know we were from Liverpool," he told George, "which was kind of weird. And she knew who you were. I figured you'd met."
"We haven't met," said George. "At least, I don't think we've met."
"For Christ's sake," said Jean. "I'm telling you, everyone knows your songs. 'All You Need is Love,' 'Here Comes the Sun,' 'Hey Jude,' 'Yellow Submarine,' 'When I'm Sixty-Four'. None of this sounds familiar?"
George shrugged. His face was blank.
"Shit," muttered Jean.
"Wait," said Paul suddenly. He was frowning. "What – what was that last one?"
She looked at him. "'When I'm Sixty-Four'?"
"Yeah, how does it go?"
"You know–" She tried singing, briefly, a line from the chorus. "When I'm sixty-four…" Then she stopped, shook her head, and tried to remember how the song started. "Um – when I get older, losing my hair, many years from now…"
Paul was still watching her, his face losing a little of its color. She kept going.
"Will you still be sending me a valentine / Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? / If I'd been out 'til quarter to three, would you lock the door…"
Paul joined in then, almost in a whisper. "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four."
Her heart was hammering. "You do know it," she whispered, her throat dry. "You know it."
He stared at her. "How the hell did you know that song?"
How the hell did you know it? she wondered. "I told you," she said, and she surprised herself with how calm and level her voice sounded. "You're famous."
"What was that, Paul?" asked George. He had reached over for a guitar sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, and now he began plucking it a little, softly and absentmindedly, with his fingers.
"It's a – it's a song," said Paul, kind of stupidly. "I wrote it in high school. I've had it in my head for a while, never did anything with it. Or…" He blinked, staring at Jean. "Maybe I did?"
"In another lifetime," George supplied.
"So you do write songs," Jean pounced. "So you are a musician? And you, too?" she added to George. She had been watching his fingers on the guitar strings without realizing it.
"I mean, yeah," said Paul. "But we're not – you know, we're not first-rate, we're not what you're describing."
"Maybe you will be," she said quietly.
There was a pause in the room, and the words sent a chill down her own spine – she hadn't even known she was going to say them. Was that what she was doing? Bringing back the Beatles, resetting history?
George gave the guitar a rest for a moment. "D'you know any more songs for us, Jean?" he asked, sounding curious.
She swallowed. "Plenty," she said dryly, "but none that I think you'd know. You wrote them all in your twenties, most of them when you were already famous – and a lot of them, I think, Paul co-wrote with John."
"Who's John?" Paul asked.
Who's John. To have Paul asking her, Who's John.
"John Lennon," she said. "He's got to be the most iconic one out of all of you. No offense," she added, as an afterthought.
"Iconic, how's that?" asked George.
She shrugged. "Funky glasses. His girlfriend, Yoko Ono. And, I don't know – a bunch of things." There was a simple answer, of course, but she wasn't sure if she could even tell them.
The assassination. The fact that John Lennon had been shot dead on the street in 1980. Of course, all of the Beatles had ended up dying at some time or another, but John…The way some people saw it, in addition to it being so gruesome and unexpected, his death had been the closing of one age, the beginning of another. There were the sixties, Beatlemania, psychedelia, civil rights, change and war and peace and love – the band's breakup – the seventies, when they were all working on solo careers, and John Lennon was doing "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" and talking all the time about peace while the government struggled to sort out the mess that was Vietnam. Then the death of John Lennon. Then the eighties, the nineties, the turn of the century. Reagan and the economy and Bush and Afghanistan and terrorism and Make America Great Again. They had never gone back.
Obviously a lot of that, even most of it, had nothing to do with Lennon at all. But it was still there, and his death for some reason felt to her like a benchmark, a wall between national sentiments.
She shook her head and shrugged again. "I don't know," she repeated quietly. "A lot of things."
Paul and George exchanged glances. She hadn't meant to sound cryptic, but they all knew that it had come across that way.
Then Paul said knowingly to George, "I think she means he was the cute one."
Jean burst out laughing.
"What?" said Paul.
"Nothing. Nothing at all."
She tried to compose herself, but she couldn't stop smiling.
After a moment George straightened up, lifting the guitar off his lap and placing it gently back on the floor next to him. "All right," he said, sitting forward and looking from Jean to Paul and back over to Jean again. "If the man's so damn iconic, maybe we ought to have a word with him."
