But now, in the flesh, straight across from me on this late night train, heading north for unlit destinations, one of them had returned. There he was, the kid himself the raw recruit, the child of the father who shouted at noon and told the sun to rise or set.
Merely alive? half alive? all alive?
I wasn’t sure.
But there he sat, thirty years later, a young-old or old-young man, sipping on his third martini.
By now, I realized that my glances were becoming much too constant and embarrassing. I studied his bright blue, wounded eyes, for that is what they were: wounded, and at last took courage and spoke:
“Pardon me,” I said. “This may seem silly, but—thirty years back, I swam weekends at the Ambassador Hotel where a military man tended the pool with his son. He—well. Are you that son?”
The young-old man across from me thought for a moment, looked me over with his shifting eyes and at last smiled, quietly.
“I,” he said, “am that son. Come on over.”
We shook hands. I sat and ordered a final round for us, as if we were celebrating something, or holding a wake, nobody seemed to know which. After the barman delivered the drinks, I said, “To nineteen fifty-two, a toast. A good year? Bad year? Here’s to it, anyway!”
We drank and the young-old man said, almost immediately, “You’re wondering what ever happened to my father.”
“My God,” I sighed.
“No, no,” he assured me, “it’s all right A lot of people have wondered, have asked, over the years.’’
The boy inside the older man nursed his martini and remembered the past.
“Do you tell people when they ask?” I said.
“I do.”
I took a deep breath. “All right, then. What did happen to your father?”
“He died.”
There was a long pause.
“Is that all?”
“Not quite.” The young-old man arranged his glass on the table in front of him, and placed a napkin at a precise angle to it, and fitted an olive to the very center of the napkin, reading the past there. “You remember what he was like?”
“Vividly.”
“Oh, what a world of meaning you put into that ‘vividly’!” The young-old man snorted faintly. “You re member his marches up, down, around the pool, left face, right, tenshun, don’t move, chin-stomach in, chest out, harch two, hut?”
“I remember.”
“Well, one day in nineteen fifty-three, long after the old crowd was gone from the pool, and you with them, my dad was drilling me outdoors one late afternoon. He had me standing in the hot sun for an hour or so and he yelled in my face, I can remember the saliva spray on my chin, my nose, my eyelids when he yelled: don’t move a muscle! don’t blink! don’t twitch! don’t breathe till I tell you! You hear, soldier? Hear? You hear! Hear?!”
“ ‘Sir!’ ” I gritted between my teeth.
“As my father turned, he slipped on the tiles and fell in the water.” The young-old man paused and gave a strange small bark of a laugh.
“Did you know? Of course you didn’t I didn’t either...that in all those years of working at various pools, cleaning out the showers, replacing the towels, repairing the diving boards, fixing the plumbing, he had never, my god, never learned to swim! Never! Jesus. It’s unbelievable. Never.
“He had never told me. Somehow, I had never guessed! And since he had just yelled at me, instructed me, ordered me: eyes right! don’t twitch! don’t move! I just stood there staring straight ahead at the late afternoon sun. I didn’t let my eyes drop to see, even once. Just straight ahead, by the numbers, as told.
“I heard him thrashing around in the water, yelling. But I couldn’t understand what he said. I heard him suck and gasp and gargle and suck again, going down, shrieking, but I stood straight, chin up, stomach tight, eyes level, sweat of my brow, mouth firm, buttocks clenched, ramrod spine, and him yelling, gagging, taking water. I kept waiting for him to yell, ‘At ease!’ ‘At ease!’ he should have yelled, but he never did. So what could I do? I just stood there, like a statue, until the shrieking stopped and the water lapped the poolrim and everything got quiet. I stood there for ten minutes, maybe twenty, half an hour, until someone came out and found me there, and they looked down in the pool and saw something deep under and said Jesus Christ and finally turned and came up to me, because they knew me and my father, and at last said, At Ease.
“And then I cried.”
The young-old man finished his drink.
“You see, the thing is, I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t faking. He’d done tricks like that before, to get me off guard, make me relax. He’d go around a corner, wait, duck back, to see if I was ramrod tall. Or he’d pretend to go in the men’s room, and jump back to find me wrong. Then he’d punish me. So, standing there by the pool that day, I thought, it’s a trick, to make me fall out. So I had to wait, didn’t I, to be sure?...to be sure.”
Finished, he put his empty martini glass down on the tray and sat back in his own silence, eyes gazing over my shoulder at nothing in particular. I tried to see if his eyes were wet, or if his mouth gave some special sign now that the tale was told, but I saw nothing.
“Now,” I said, “I know about your father. But...what ever happened to you?”
“As you see,” he said, “I’m here.”
He stood up and reached over and shook my hand.
“Good night,” he said.
I looked straight up in his face and saw the young boy there waiting for orders five thousand afternoons back. Then I looked at his left hand; no wedding ring there. Which meant what? No sons, no future? But I couldn’t ask.
“I’m glad we met again,” I heard myself say.
“Yes.” He nodded, and gave my hand a final shake.
“It’s good to see you made it through.”
Me, I thought. My God! Me?!
But he had turned and was walking off down the aisle, beautifully balanced, not swaying with the train’s motion, this way or that. He moved in a clean, lithe, well-cared-for body, which the train’s swerving could do nothing to as he went away.
As he reached the door, he hesitated, his back to me, and he seemed to be waiting for some final word, some order, some shout from someone.
Forward, I wanted to say, by the numbers! March!
But I said nothing.
Not knowing if it would kill him, or release him, I simply bit my tongue, and watched him open the door, slip silently through, and stride down the corridor of the next sleeping car toward a past I just might have imagined, toward a future I could not guess.
A Touch of Petulance
On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fete, commuting from another time, another year, another life.
His fete was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island. It was the newspaper held by this fete disguised as an older man that caused Jonathan Hughes to stare and finally say:
“Sir, pardon me, your New York Times seems different from mine. The typeface on your front page seems more modern. Is that a later edition?”
“No!” The older man stopped, swallowed hard, and at last managed to say, “Yes. A very late edition.”
Hughes glanced around. “Excuse me, but—all the other editions look the same. Is yours a trial copy for a future change?”
“Future?” The older man’s mouth barely moved. His entire body seemed to wither in his clothes, as if he had lost weight with a single exhalation. “Indeed,” he whispered. “Future change. God, what a joke.”
Jonathan Hughes blinked at the newspaper’s dateline:
May 2, 1999.
“Now, see here—” he protested, and then his eyes moved down to find a small story, minus picture, in the upper-left-hand corner of the front page:
WOMAN MURDEBED
POLICE SE
EK HUSBAND
Body of Mrs. Alice Hughes found shot to death—
The train thundered over a bridge. Outside the window, a billion trees rose up, flourished their green branches in convulsions of wind, then fell as if chopped to earth.
The train rolled into a station as if nothing at all in the world had happened. In the silence, the young man’s eyes returned to the text:
Jonathan Hughes, certified public accountant,
of 112 Plandome Avenue, Plandome—
“My God!” he cried. “Get away!”
But he himself rose and ran a few steps back before the older man could move. The train jolted and threw him into an empty seat where he stared wildly out at a river of green light that rushed past the windows.
Christ, he thought, who would do such a thing? Who’d try to hurt us—us? What land of joke? To mock a new marriage with a fine wife? Damn! And again, trembling, Damn, oh, damn!
The train rounded a curve and all but threw him to his feet. Like a man drunk with traveling, gravity, and simple rage, he swung about and lurched back to con front the old man, bent now into his newspaper, gone to earth, hiding in print. Hughes brushed the paper out of the way, and clutched the old man’s shoulder. The old man, startled, glanced up, tears running from his eyes. They were both held in a long moment of thunderous traveling. Hughes felt his soul rise to leave his body.
“Who are you?”
Someone must have shouted that.
The train rocked as if it might derail.
The old man stood up as if shot in the heart, blindly crammed something in Jonathan Hughes’s hand, and blundered away down the aisle and into the next car. The younger man opened his fist and turned a card over and read a few words that moved him heavily down to sit and read the words again:
JONATHAN HUGHES, CPA
679-4990. Plandome.
“No!” someone shouted. Me, thought the young man. Why, that old man is...me.
There was a conspiracy, no, several conspiracies. Someone had contrived a joke about murder and played it on him. The train roared on with five hundred commuters who all rode, swaying like a team of drunken intellectuals behind their masking books and papers, while the old man, as if pursued by demons, fled off away from car to car. By the time Jonathan Hughes had rampaged his blood and completely thrown his sanity off balance, the old man had plunged, as if felling, to the farthest end of the commuter’s special.
The two men met again in the last car, which was almost empty. Jonathan Hughes came and stood over the old man, who refused to look up. He was crying so hard now that conversation would have been impossible.
Who, thought the young man, who is he crying for? Stop, please, stop.
The old man, as if commanded, sat up, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and began to speak in a frail voice that drew Jonathan Hughes near and finally caused him to sit and listen to the whispers:
“We were born—”
“We?” cried the young man.
“We,” whispered the old man, looking out at the gathering dusk that traveled like smokes and burnings past the window, “we, yes, we, the two of us, we were born in Quincy in nineteen fifty, August twenty-second—”
Yes, thought Hughes.
“—and lived at Forty-nine Washington Street and went to Central School and walked to that school all through first grade with Isabel Perry—”
Isabel, thought the young man.
“We...” murmured the old man. “Our” whispered the old man. “Us.” And went on and on with it:
“Our woodshop teacher, Mr. Bisbee. History teacher, Miss Monks. We broke our right ankle, age ten, ice-skating. Almost drowned, age eleven; Father saved us. Fell in love, age twelve, Impi Johnson—”
Seventh grade, lovely lady, long since dead, Jesus God, thought the young man, growing old.
And that’s what happened. In the next minute, two minutes, three, the old man talked and talked and gradually became younger with talking, so his cheeks glowed and his eyes brightened, while the young man, weighted with old knowledge given, sank lower in his seat and grew pale so that both almost met in mid-talking, mid-listening, and became twins in passing. There was a moment when Jonathan Hughes knew for an absolute insane certainty, that if he dared glance up he would see identical twins m the mirrored window of a night-rushing world.
He did not look up.
The old man finished, his frame erect now, his head somehow driven high by the talking out, the long lost revelations.
“That’s the past,” he said.
I should hit him, thought Hughes. Accuse him. Shout at him. Why aren’t I hitting, accusing, shouting?
Because....
The old man sensed the question and said, “You know I’m who I say I am. I know everything there is to know about us. Now—the future?”
“Mine?”
“Ours,” said the old man.
Jonathan Hughes nodded, staring at the newspaper clutched in the old man’s right hand. The old man folded it and put it away.
“Your business will slowly become less than good. For what reasons, who can say? A child will be born and die. A mistress will be taken and lost. A wife will become less than good. And at last, oh believe it, yes, do, very slowly, you will come to—how shall I say it—hate her living presence. There, I see I’ve upset you. I’ll shut up.”
They rode in silence for a long while, and the old man grew old again, and the young man along with him. When he had aged just the proper amount, the young man nodded the talk to continue, not looking at the other who now said:
“Impossible, yes, you’ve been married only a year, a great year, the best. Hard to think that a single drop of ink could color a whole pitcher of clear fresh water. But color it could and color it did. And at last the entire world changed, not just our wife, not just the beautiful woman, the fine dream.”
“You—” Jonathan Hughes started and stopped. “You— killed her?”
“We did. Both of us. But if I have my way, if I can convince you, neither of us will, she will live, and you will grow old to become a happier, finer me. I pray for that. I weep for that. There’s still time. Across the years, I intend to shake you up, change your blood, shape your mind. God, if people knew what murder is. So silly, so stupid, so—ugly. But there is hope, for I have somehow got here, touched you, begun the change that will save our souls. Now, listen. You do admit, do you not, that we are one and the same, that the twins of time ride this train this hour this night?”
The train whistled ahead of them, clearing the track of an encumbrance of years. The young man nodded the most infinitely microscopic of nods. The old man needed no more.
“I ran away. I ran to you. That’s all I can say. She’s been dead only a day, and I ran. Where to go? Nowhere to hide, save Time. No one to plead with, no judge, no jury, no proper witnesses save—you. Only you can wash the blood away, do you see? You drew me, then. Your youngness, your innocence, your good hours, your fine life still un touched, was the machine that seized me down the track. All of my sanity lies in you. If you turn away, great God, I’m lost, no, we are lost. Well share a grave and never rise and be buried forever in misery. Shall I tell you what you must do?”
The young man rose.
“Plandome,” a voice cried. “Plandome.”
And they were out on the platform with the old man running after, the young man blundering into walls, into people, feeling as if his limbs might fly apart.
“Wait!” cried the old man. “Oh, please.”
The young man kept moving.
“Don t you see, we’re in this together, we must think of it together, solve it together, so you won’t become me and I won’t have to come impossibly in search of you, oh, it’s all mad, insane, I know, I know, but listen!”
The young man stopped at the edge of the platform where cars were pulling in, with joyful cries or muted greetings, brief honkngs, gunnings of motors, lights vanishing away. The old man grasped the young man’s elbow.
&
nbsp; “Good God, your wife, mine, will be here in a moment, there’s so much to tell, you can’t know what I know, there’s twenty years of unfound information lost between which we must trade and understand! Are you listening? God, you don’t believe!”
Jonathan Hughes was watching the street A long way off a final car was approaching. He said: “What happened in the attic at my grandmother’s house in the summer of nineteen fifty-eight? No one knows that but me. Well?”
The old man’s shoulders slumped. He breathed more easily, and as if reciting from a promptboard said: “We hid ourselves there for two days, alone. No one ever knew where we hid. Everyone thought we had run away to drown in the lake or fall in the river. But all the tune, crying, not feeling wanted, we hid up above and...listened to the wind and wanted to die.”
The young man turned at last to stare fixedly at his older self, tears in his eyes. “You love me, then?”
“I had better,” said the old man. “I’m all you have.”
The car was pulling up at the station. A young woman smiled and waved behind the glass.
“Quick,” said the old man, quietly. “Let me come home, watch, show you, teach you, find where things went wrong, correct them now, maybe hand you a fine life forever, let me—”
The car horn sounded, the car stopped, the young woman leaned out. “Hello, lovely man!” she cried.
Jonathan Hughes exploded a laugh and burst into a manic run. “Lovely lady, hi—”
“Wait”
He stopped and turned to look at the old man with the newspaper, trembling there on the station platform. The old man raised one hand, questioningly.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?”
Silence. At last: “You,” said Jonathan Hughes. “You.”
The car rounded a turn in the night. The woman, the old man, the young man, swayed with the motion. “What did you say your name was?” the young woman said, above the rush and run of country and road.
“He didn’t say,” said Jonathan Hughes quickly.
“Weldon,” said the old man, blinking.
“Why,” said Alice Hughes. “That’s my maiden name.”
The old man gasped inaudibly, but recovered. “Well, is it? How curious!”