Time Travail
Howard Waldman
In memory of Eric Anderson
Time Travail
One
But then at the threshold of entry (after all this time), forefinger rigid on the red dispatching button, suddenly the intruder, that old bum with the funny gizmo on his head, sabotaging the voyage back. How did he get past the triple-bolted cellar door? Hasn’t he already pulled the trick at the same critical moment, materializing like a ghost with that metal thing on his head, making you think: “What the hell is he up to? Is he insane?”
Think that now. Maybe yell it to drive him away. But he stays. Becomes even more familiar. Distance starts collapsing. That’s the next stage of lucidity.
Forced to recognize the old bum with the funny gizmo on his head as Jerry Weizman, late Associate Professor of English, largely freshman, stranded high and dry, he too, in this trivial time-space intersection. Already able to recite the space-locus accurately (USA, Long Island, NY, Forest Hill, 8 President Wilson Street, Harvey Morgenstern’s cellar) but still have trouble with the time-locus. Clock says 3:46. Night or day? And what day? What month even? Remember leaving hot high sun coming down here, so summer, but can’t recall the year yet. It’ll come back any second, the way the bum’s coming back strong, threatening merger.
Merger’s happening now in great pain. He (I) is (am) seated at the console in the red gloom of the cellar, entangled, practically strangled, in the coils of Harvey’s machine, coiffed with a wired metal helmet. Now ridiculous He and spectator I merge totally into suffering Me staring at Me reflected in the dead screen.
To combat the pain of lucidity there’s always Lord’s Vineyards. The blasphemous $8.99 bottle of California sauterne stands half-empty on the console.
Now it’s three-quarters empty. There are others, completely empty, under the console. It’s got powerful anti-lucidity virtues but is hell on my stomach. Ever since my purveyor started peddling intergalactic religion to me instead of contractual tetrahydrocannabinol, I’ve had to depend heavily on the sauterne for what Harvey called the amplifier effect, indispensable for the voyage.
I start sneezing now. Coming down with the flu. Pressing the red button on the console might bring relief either through annihilation or the happening of long-desired things, first on the screen before me and then in my head beneath the wired metal helmet. But the only thing happening on the dark screen for the moment is my own white-stubbled bummish face, the contemporary one. I once saw it marvelously young and handsome there during a voyage back. In the red gloom manufactured by Harvey’s twenty bulbs the present reflection is dim, a mercy. The past two months have finally dumped my true age on me and maybe more.
I’m getting on. “Getting on” is what old Miss Forster in PS 89 way back in the 30s – I saw her again a while ago but much fainter – called a “phrasal verb”, an ambiguous one because “getting on”, among other things, also means “making progress”, in my case to one grim thing only, let’s face it. I got on a long time ago and soon will be getting off. Maybe any second now if I press the red button and Harvey’s calculations prove wrong for me as I think they did for him when he pressed it.
All in all, taking the good with the bad, it’s been a pretty lousy trip. I’m more scared than consoled at the idea that one day another Harvey Morgenstern, as yet unborn, may resurrect me on a screen the way the original Harvey Morgenstern imperfectly did his early contemporaries, among them Miss Forster with her broken front tooth and also Rachel Rosen the night of her death.
I’ve just sneezed again. It’s bitterly dank down here in his cellar, a foretaste of eternity as I imagine it. Where’s my handkerchief? I can hear rats stirring about in the open bag of potato chips near the cot. The rim of the metal cap bites into my forehead painfully. It can do worse things than that, I know.
Maybe as a stalling tactic, not to commit myself one way or the other with the red button, I start playing games with my ghostly reflection on the screen, try to imagine situations more orthodox than the real one to explain the presence of that biting thing on my head.
Despite all the transformations it still looks very much like what it once was: an old-fashioned woman’s permanent-wave helmet. But it’s no beauty parlor down here. Now the thing seems to be a big inverted funnel I’m wearing. But isn’t that how madmen are represented in I can’t remember what country? In great fear of that definition I now see the thing as the cap occupants of the New York State electric chair used to get crowned with. This invention is even worse, for I’m convinced the ex-permanent-wave helmet is capable of a fatal hair singe, a permanent wave goodbye.
Anyhow, no matter what Harvey said at the end, what crime did I ever commit? I’m a man of omissions, not commissions. I try to invalidate the image of retribution by recalling that the condemned have arm and leg straps to make them stay put in their final chair. There are none on mine. I haven’t even got that excuse for being where I am.
Come to think of it, the thing on my head looks more like a futuristic dunce cap than anything else.
So say an innocent dunce in a lucid moment.
If I’d had the sense not to stoop for his check that day I’d be 2000 miles from this place in my nice warm bed. Having nightmares probably but ones I could wake up out of. Accepting that check was just one of a long series of mistakes that started practically with birth. I’m tempted to go back in my own private built-in time machine – a million times more efficient than his – to the day when I got fatally involved and pass in review the subsequent mistakes. I know there’s danger in going back like that. You can get sucked down in memory and suffocate. But this time I’ll view myself from way above, practice safe detachment, lucid dissociation. I’ll look down at JW blundering away and match his grimaces with grins, try to double up with laughter when he doubles up with pain. Maybe I’ll finally learn from those mistakes of mine, extract precious survival lessons for the future.
What future? Isn’t this just another stalling tactic? Putting off the choice I’ll finally have to make: either take my chances with the machine or remove the thing from my head and leave this house for good and take my chances with what’s left for me of forward-moving time outside?
Now my nose is starting to run. A salty taste like the sea or tears.
Where the hell is my handkerchief?
That sunny September day began at nine, like all my other days since retirement, with vacuum cleaning. I cleaned my vacuum again with great thoroughness, both rooms. I’m maybe a little compulsive about cleanliness (in those days I was anyhow) although I wouldn’t say anally regressive about it. That was my second ex-wife’s diagnosis. Mary attributed it to rigid Judeo-Christian toilet training. Whatever, I can’t stand having to contemplate disorder, (couldn’t in those days, anyhow). It was too much like a metaphor for intimate things. As usual I spent long minutes over my audio system with the Swiss electro-static-nullifying feather-brush. There aren’t a hundred systems of that quality in the world. We’re both sensitive to dust.
After, I went down for possible mail, the second major event of the day, one I never missed out on. With the sudden end to my teaching activities I’d learned to restructure my days with small things. I’d been retired three months before, transitively, the way certain people are suicided. Times were tough in education. People had to go. I had published, but not enough (not even for a third-rate state university). Both parties involved pretended to believe that official reason. They carefully skirted the real reason, like skirting sidewalk dog excrement. But hadn’t the thing been practically by mutual consent? Enough of that.
So I perished. Professionally, of course. What survived was going through motions in a furnished two-room flat I owed rent on.
Getting
the mail was one of the motions. Since my “retirement” I’d learned to fill my waking hours with activities, physical and mental. I’d learned not to relax, not to become indifferent. It appears that cerebral decline creeps up on you in the flattering disguise of “above it all” indifference. What you take for Olympian serenity the world rightly chalks up to softening of the brain.
This concern with cerebral decline started in the middle of one night soon after I was scrapped. A person I’d long ago succeeded in not thinking of came back more or less. Her face was indistinct and I couldn’t remember her name. Couldn’t. When her name came back shortly before dawn I got up and wrote it a number of times, Rachel, Rachel, on scraps of paper in order not to forget the next time. Wasn’t that cheating? I saw myself in the mirror doing it and, through tears, found myself comically pathetic.
Even she might have smiled at the sight if she hadn’t been dead for nearly half a century (we can go back and see them imperfectly but they can’t ever see us). I tried to imagine her face but couldn’t. I think it was then that I started trying to combat cerebral decline.
The trouble is, one of the symptoms of cerebral decline is concern with cerebral decline. I’d come to recognize it, for example, in the little warm feeling I experienced when learning that so-and-so had whipped up a masterpiece at an advanced age. Haydn at seventy imitating God with his Creation and on the whole doing a better job of it. Michelangelo at the same age pulling off the Saint Peter’s Basilica. Verdi still green at eighty with Falstaff. Picasso pushing ninety but engraving that sex-exercise series, maybe no dim memory. Now I’m on to another kind of bitter decline. But I did have the models of V. Hugo and L. N. Tolstoy, indefatigable white-bearded impregnators of servant-girls
Of course I wasn’t in their league but I did have my own disciplines. Senility can be combated to a certain extent by physical and intellectual discipline. From ten to eleven, after the mail, I kept on my toes with Hungarian on tape (Assimil). Hungarian is said, rightly I think, to be the most challenging of European languages. Another example of intellectual calisthenics was the way I forced myself to grapple with music I’d never been able to penetrate in my younger days, even though penetration was even less my strong point now. Mainly Gregorian chants and medieval masses for the dead. Mood music for meditations on the passage of time, love and money.
Not just mentally, also corporally I tried to keep trim. This was easier. I watched what I ate, if not what I drank. The year before, in the university pool, a woman colleague (Marianne Richards of the French Department) had said: “Why, Jerry, you have the body of a forty-year-old, myumm!” I had the vanity to feel offended at the limits of her comparison but realized she meant well and so returned the compliment, gallantly lowering the age comparison and concluding with, “myumm, myumm, myumm!” This was excessive and imprudent. It started that way.
But I was on the subject of physical fitness. I had a chinning-bar permanently wedged in the bathroom doorframe. I learned to duck, most of the time, on the way to the toilet at night. Rain or shine I jogged an hour, not in the direction of the University campus. I didn’t go out of my way to avoid my former colleagues but didn’t exactly hammer at their doors. Any more than they did at mine, with one persistent exception.
I wasn’t bitter about it. I understood that I still gave off that tremendous distancing aura of people stricken by some incurable illness (leprosy, say) or inconsolable loss. Some of the colleagues I did bump into commiserated till I felt like telling them not to take it so hard. Others said I was lucky to have retired seven years in advance. Most carefully avoided the subject as they hadn’t been able to avoid me in the street. I smiled steadily for them all.
One day in the supermarket Harry Richards of the English Department playfully clashed his shopping-cart into mine. I had to ask how Marianne was doing although I knew in detail. Harry said I wasn’t looking so hot and that statistically half the nervous breakdowns occurred in the first year of retirement. He warned against solitude and advised me to find a lady-friend. One my own age for a change, he added, but not nastily. He’s a nice guy basically and I wasn’t happy to see him.
But I’m wandering. This is probably symptomatic. At least I’m lucid about my growing befuddlement. I began by saying that after my short-term victory over dust I went down for the mail. I came back with a double handful, a real harvest. Reading the mail, all of it, while breakfasting and electric shaving had become a ritual. If somebody asked me: “What is the major symptom of advancing age?” I would say: “Instead of dumping it all unread into the garbage-pail, the pre-senescent open and meditate over every piece of junk-mail.”
That morning I got a color-catalog of Taiwanese watches. They are enviably shock-resistant with non-volatile memories, show the time in five capitals I’ll never visit now, calculate solar and lunar eclipses till the useless year 2025, beep Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to wake you, even in winter, with spring or summer. They are proof against deep descents and provide automatic countdown. That morning there was also a gardening handout featuring a sale on tulip-bulbs. Just pop them into the earth in fall and up they pop as flowers in spring. There was also an advertisement for old-age incapacity insurance. At each turning point in your life you get on a mailing list or off one. I didn’t get advertisements for X-rated videocassettes any more.
The next letter, from Mary, my second ex-wife, was as impersonal as the others. She got to the point with a minimum of verbiage. I owed her three months’ alimony, it seemed. Deadline: next Friday. If the matter had to be placed in the hands of the law it would cost me much more. I sincerely believe that if the roles had been reversed, I she and she me, I’d have recalled moments of tenderness and wouldn’t have let grievances completely stifle compassion. After all she got the house, didn’t she? And damn close to getting my audio system as well.
After meditation over the timepieces I dumped all the communications into the garbage-pail. I was trying to cope with Lesson Ten when the landlady knocked on the door. She was holding a letter. She listened to the intensely alien sounds behind me.
“Oh Professor Weizman: Hungarian! Do you know Hungarian too? My father was Hungarian.” I tried to pretend I was glad to see her. I’d been avoiding her of late.
“Mrs Philips,” I stammered, “any day now I’ll take care of the three months’ rent I owe you.”
She sounded almost offended at that. “Three months? It’s just two months’ rent.”
Of course. Two months was for the rent, three months for the alimony arrears. More mental confusion.
“There’s no hurry, Professor,” she comforted.
All of Mrs Philips was in that answer. No deadline with her. I suspected she knew of my axing. Sometimes I found myself fantasizing about a twilight third marriage with a woman like Mrs Philips, with Mrs Philips herself, to tell the truth. She was youngish and of boundless goodness and patience: this is what I badly needed. A good cook too, judging by what I sniffed at mealtimes going past her door up to nuked pizza. It would have been an elegant end to rent-arrears as well.
One thing was sure. If it didn’t work out she would never hound me for impossible alimony. As for the age-gap – she couldn’t be much over forty – couldn’t cultural prestige bridge that? Moreover, I am (or was) astonishingly well preserved and can (or could) generate vestigial charm in case of necessity. She had a plain but kind face and a pleasant body. Probably too demanding, that body. Besides, she no longer had her Hungarian maiden name. Her husband was taciturn and muscular.
“Don’t you worry about the rent,” she said. “I just wanted to give you this letter. You must have dropped it. I found it on the staircase.”
The envelope was addressed in a crabbed hand to “Assistant Professor J. Weizman.” The belittling precision of “assistant” was unusual. It’s true I’d been an Assistant Professor for a long long time till I finally made it to Associate Professor, but in the days when I got meaningful mail, correspondents nearly always concede
d full professorship to me on the envelope. I didn’t like being demoted retroactively even if I was nothing at all now.
I pulled the letter out and a check fluttered to the floor. Kneeling to it I made out as in a dream one thousand dollars to the order of myself (still defined as an assistant) and signed, in the same crabbed hand, Harvey Morgenstern. The name transported me back, unwillingly, thirty years and more. So he too had survived. But not in a furnished room stooping for a check, you could bet.
Reading him or listening to him you’d never guess Harvey Morgenstern was a genius, one of the mid-century pioneers of advanced cybernetics. He’d also calculated intercontinental ballistic missile trajectories onto populous targets and, as it later turned out, succeeded at enormous effort in inscribing a few faint scratches on the mile-thick time-barrier. He didn’t verbalize gracefully had always been the problem. Now he had others.
Hi Jerry,
Not kicking all that much but am still alive. Long time no see – in the flesh, that is. (What does that mean: “in the flesh”?) Still knocking the broads flat on their backs right and left? But hey, you’re getting on. Can you still get it up? It’s all a memory for me and I’m beginning to lose that too. But I think it can be beaten. Memory problems I mean. I don’t want to say anything more about it in case this letter gets into the wrong hands. I think you can guess what it is. Remember the blue mouse? Rounding off, 209,880,000 times better than that. If you remember the blue mouse figure it out yourself.
Now the thing is I need help, the way you used to help me in the old days. Remember the old days way back when we screwed around with the induction coil and the X-ray machine and gassed mice and shocked the shit out of the Polacks? I have bad memory problems because of the treatment (I’ll tell you about that when I see you) but I do remember the Polacks. This is a good day for memory. And boy do I remember you sweating away on the Static Electricity Machine bike although to be honest I had help with that particular memory. Don’t make me say more.
Anyhow this is my proposition. I want you to come out here to Forest Hill. You must have plenty of time on your hands now (how did he learn about that?) and maybe the money would come in handy. I can offer you five hundred bucks a week as my collaborator. You’d come and live here with me rent-free – separate rooms, of course, I know you’re not that way. Free meals too. You should just taste Hanna’s cooking. We could talk over old times. The check is to prove this is no gag and to cover your moving expenses. Why not try it out for a month? Whichever way you decide, yes or no, you’ll be two thousand dollars to the good. I’m quite ill and can’t handle all of the work myself.
I’m really ill, Jerry. I haven’t got all that much time. It’s something very big. Now what I want you to do is this: I want you to give me a buzz and say you’re coming right away because I haven’t got all that much time to wait around. But if what I’m working on works out I’ll have all the time in the world. So will you. I ain’t forgettin’ my old pal. (Pal?)
See you soon, OK?
Harvey Morgenstern
In a postscript he gave me his phone number and asked me to bring all the old photos of Forest Hill in the old days. Above all, photos of Rachel. He’d asked for photos of Rachel maybe thirty years ago and I’d never answered. Did I remember who Rachel Rosen was?
One thing was sure. Memory loss wasn’t the worst that had happened to his mind. All my life I’ve attracted the mentally unbalanced. I like to think it’s the attraction of the dissimilar, something like positive and negative magnetic poles. I’m scared of them, the way they look into your eyes and assume a secret congruence. Normally I pull back fast. But there was a check in this case and more to come. Didn’t the proposition at least deserve careful reflection? I gave it a second’s worth and grabbed for the phone.
As the other phone thousands of miles eastward buzzed away in my ear the four monomaniac walls about me with their reiterated large purple flowers fell away. I felt buoyant, ten years younger, as though I’d conquered time. It was a premonitory feeling although of course I didn’t know it then. If I had I’d have hung up. I allowed myself to realize how sick I was of all those attempts to fill the vacuum with push-ups, chinning, jogging and junk-mail, sick of half-thawed pizza, sick of banging my forehead against the chinning-bar at midnight, sick of plainchants and contrapuntal prayers for the dead. I felt sorry I wouldn’t see Christine (Mrs Philips) any more. But it would never have worked out. I thought of all those Long Island beaches. I hadn’t seen the sea for years.
The phone buzzed on and on until finally I got a woman’s voice. It was shrill and querulous. Right off the bat she wanted to know what I wanted. It was dislike at first hark. I said that I wished to speak to Mr Harvey Morgenstern. She actually snapped: “Who are you?” I requested her to kindly inform Mr Morgenstern that my name was Professor J. Weizman. I had received a letter from him that morning asking me to contact him.
“Oh Jesus, the letter. Listen, Mr I-didn’t-catch-your-name, if it’s the letter I think it is, he sent out twenny of them. I know, I had to mail them. Even had to pay for the goddam stamps. Those letters weren’t serious.”
“Mine must have been. There was a check in it,” I said, a childish fall from dignity. I wanted to hold on to my sudden wealth with the promise of more to come and an end to vacuum. For the second time (and not the last time as it turned out), I wondered if Harvey wasn’t a mental case. Maybe there’d been checks in the other nineteen letters too, phony, like mine.
“A check? How big a check?”
Her alarm was encouraging. I actually told her the amount. Maybe Harvey wasn’t the only mental case.
“A thousand dollars?! What did you do with it?”
“What one generally does with checks. Mr Morgenstern, please.”
“You mean you deposited it? That wasn’t honest. He’s a very sick man. I try to protect him from people like you, not that I get any thanks for it. Look, I know what my uncle wrote you about, that thing down in the cellar. Jesus, the electricity bills we run up and what for? You’d be wasting your time coming out here, Mister.”
His niece must have read the letter. Niece? Harvey had no niece.
She broke off and started talking to someone. Then that characteristic deadness of a hand over the receiver. Finally I got another voice, between a whisper and a croak, barely audible and totally unfamiliar. Am I confusing this with a later thing? I seem to remember that hearing that voice for the very first time my mind compared it to a flickering distorted image.
“Hi pal. Glad you. Phoned. Can you. Make it out here. Today?” He said something else but I didn’t get it because his voice started going. It went out.
“Hold on.” It was the woman again. I held on for minutes.
“You still there? Listen, my uncle can’t talk. I tole you. He wrote something. He wants me to read it. Here goes.”
She chanted it slowly like someone little accustomed to the written word.
“Sorry Jerry voice troubles don’t let Hanna scare you off. She … Hey, you can’t make me read this …”
Hand-over-the-receiver deadness again. Then she was back with a weepy voice:
“He says sorry Jerry voice troubles don’t let Hanna scare you off he says he says she’s not a bad girl just men-menopause problems that’s not true you sonofabitch. He says don’t worry she knows what side her AT&T shares are bu-buttered on how can he say that?” She started sniffing then finished reading. “When can you come? Expecting you today. That’s what my uncle wrote. He wants an answer now.”
I told her to tell him I was glad to hear from him but I would have to think over his proposition. I would ring back that evening at the latest. I hung up fast. The purple flowers welcomed me back.
I tried to return to the Hungarian lesson. I could still hear that hoarse whispered claim to friendship in my ear as though from some cavern 2000 miles deep and the sullen voice of the woman forced to insult herself to a stranger. I switched off the recorded voice. The in
side ones went on. I changed into my jogging things. For some reason I slipped Harvey’s letter into the jacket-pocket. Outside in the fresh air the voices faded.
I turned left at the end of the street instead of right as usual, I didn’t know why, and started jogging down Ambrose Avenue. The letter rustled in my pocket. Without realizing it I began taking great strides, practically leaping, like a superannuated ballet-dancer. I bounced, puffing, into view of my bank between a record-shop and a fancy shoe-store. It was as though my foolish feet had commanded me. I suddenly found myself depositing Harvey’s check and withdrawing practically all my savings: seven hundred dollars. I told myself that if I deposited the check it was either to pay good long-suffering Mrs Philips or else to make a minimum gesture to my second ex-wife. I would carefully choose the beneficiary.
But my jubilant feet directed me to shops just yards from the bank and I bought ten-year-old single-malt, English shoes and numerous CDs of penetrable music. I had just about enough left for the plane-fare to New York.
As Harvey had pointed out in his letter I could always try it out for a month. At the worst I’d have two thousand dollars. I’d be able to settle my debts with both my ex-wife and my landlady, simultaneously. It seemed more elegant that way than settling with just one, immediately, to the detriment of the other.
I left early the next day. I forgot that Marianne dropped in at four after her last class.
As I boarded the plane I remembered that I’d have to reset my watch. For a moment I couldn’t recall whether it was a later or an earlier time zone.