***
Nine
A minute went by. The only sound was the ticking of the alarm clock. Then I heard his footsteps moving away from the door and then the diminishing creaks of the staircase. The ticking of the clock finally covered the sound.
After a while I slipped my bathrobe on and went downstairs. You could hear the sensors working away in the dark dead room. All I felt was emptiness there. I stood on the threshold of the cellar for a while. Then went down carefully, step by step. I kept to the wall side of the stairs as though those extra inches could make a difference to the rays. The junk-heap hulked in the red gloom. He was crouched forward in his chair, hiding the screen. I moved to one side to see it, standing as far away from the lead-plated door as possible, my back against the cinder-block wall.
For an hour I saw a succession of flickering close-ups of drapes, the oval mirror, furniture detail, windowpanes, the chandelier, the grinning skeleton teeth of the piano, hundreds of other objects. Once his father scuttled eyeless across the room.
Of course she was gone. Had vanished even before he’d undertaken the painful journey up two flights to tell me about it. Why had he bothered? She’d died in December 1952. That entitled her to about eight seconds’ electronic existence. What he’d seen would never come back.
He’d told me about that. In the mode of random selectivity the probability of an identical return to a particular spatial-temporal intersection was practically nil. It was part of the more general problem of temporal navigation. I went on looking anyhow.
At the end I asked him what she’d been doing, what she’d looked like. I had to repeat the question twice, louder each time. Finally, without turning around he said she’d been seated in the striped armchair chatting with his mother in the flowered one. He’d been able to read my name on her lips.
After a while I went upstairs. My eyes started to burn, a symptom. I’d got a good dose of rays. I stopped in the corridor. It still felt empty, one-dimensional in the lonely stratum of the present. I felt empty too. It was like a broken appointment. I tried to imagine her there but couldn’t. I’d never seen her in that living room. After the move to Brooklyn she’d visited the Morgensterns twice a month for years but without me.
What came back was another living room with my mother and Mrs Morgenstern. I saw (see) Rachel coming down. My mother says something to her in Yiddish and embraces and kisses her. Rachel smiles shyly with that slight shrinking of hers when offering herself for embrace, always a dangerously consoling one with my mother. I see her staring seriously over my mother’s shoulder at Harvey as he comes in, abstracted, not noticing any of us.
But that had been in the old living room, not this one. I went back to bed.
When I woke up at ten o’clock in the morning Hanna’s TV wasn’t booming as usual. There were no sounds anywhere in the house. The only thing I heard was the rain lashing against the panes. My eyes were still burning. I tried to imagine my mother seated in a striped armchair I’d never seen. All I could come up with was the image of her embracing Rachel, the wrong time and the wrong living room.
I was alone in the house. Hanna must have muscled Harvey off to the hospital again. Their rays, the therapeutic ones, would burn away more of his memory-units, placing that much more burden on me. I didn’t turn the light on in the corridor. It was like solitary midnight there. I opened the door of the dead room and stood at the threshold.
In the gray light from the weepy windows I could see the lenses working away in the four corners. They were busy with their vision of what I couldn’t see even though I’d been down in the cellar for a good hour that night. Maybe I’d stood too far away from the lead-plated wall. I went inside and stood in the middle of the room for a while. The sofa bore the imprint of Harvey’s body. I felt tired and stretched out on it.
On the low table next to the sofa there was a dish with half a salami-sandwich and a roach on it, pencils, a ruler, a draftsman’s compass, a directional compass and a pile of papers. I tried to chase the roach away. It didn’t budge. I touched it and it fell over on its back.
It was strange. The living room used to swarm with roaches. This was the first one I’d seen since the sensors had been set up. Maybe they had the sense to steer clear of them. I looked at the papers.
At first glance they looked like cubist drawings. Examined, they resolved into confused house-plans. The confusion came from the overlap of a second, dotted, house-plan on the first one. It was like a photo of a bombed-out city with one roofless building disastrously involved with another one. No two diagrams were identical. The angle and degree of overlap differed. So did the layout and size of the rooms in the two houses. There was a red circle on the dotted diagram. On each paper the red circle covered a different part of what I understood was Beth Anderson’s house.
I understood that he was trying to situate Rachel’s bedroom on it, the past on the present. No version was definitive. There were question marks on all of them. Some had been crumpled and then smoothed out.
When I woke up I was still holding one of the diagrams. A sensor lens zoomed in on my sudden movement as I placed the diagram back on top of the pile.
I went upstairs and started changing into my jogging clothes. The rain dashed harder against the panes. Beth Anderson’s house was ghostly behind the undulating curtain of rain. There was movement behind a first-floor window. I thought of a pretext and went over to the bookshelf where my books had replaced his and chose something easy. I changed back and went over to her house.
She took a long time opening the door. She was holding a window-wiper in one red rubber-gloved hand with the other cupped beneath it to catch a dirty drop. “Why Jerry, you’re drenched, come on in. But promise not to look at me.”
She looked like an aging street-urchin in a man’s shirt four sizes too big and knotted over her bare abdomen. She was wearing low tattered jeans. She had a cap on her head at an angle and a smudge on her cheek. I’d never seen her that spontaneous sweating way. For some reason she made me think of Huck Finn and afterwards I sometimes called her that.
A vacuum cleaner was lying in the middle of the living room. I apologized. I hadn’t realized it was Saturday morning. It had been a sudden idea. She’d once said how she wished she could have sat in on one of my classes. The class could come to her, I said, showing her the book. Some other day, of course, I added. She blinked. I realized too late that she was wondering: if poems why not her son’s poems? I’d have to get around to that blue box.
She recovered and said, “Oh, Robert Frost! I … I’d be delighted, honored. Don’t go. I’ve practically finished with the house cleaning. I’ll be down in a few seconds.” She almost ran upstairs. A shower started up.
I stood in the middle of that other living room. I didn’t move or make a sound. I remembered how once in a wood I’d stood like that, absolutely motionless and silent waiting for some small shy animal to come for my camera. I stood like that (in the wood) for an hour. It hadn’t come. After a while (in her living room) I began wandering around, examining the goldfish goggling magnified in his bowl, the potted plants, the imitation Scandinavian furniture, the reproductions of harmonious bouquets and landscapes on the pastel walls. There was nothing beneath it. It was all safe surface, I thought.
A minute later I came across an imitation 18th century jewel-box with a porcelain lid showing a shepherdess and a swain simpering against pink clouds. I opened it and found a tube of Valium inside.
When she came down a half hour later she was all dressed up and coiffed in her usual banal perfection. Scent had replaced the faintly acrid smell of her sweating body. She’d been more attractive dressed down for house cleaning. We did a few Frost poems. She said she’d adored Wall Mending and would love to do more. That’s how our classroom sessions started. I felt better after and told myself again that her house was a good place to retreat to when it became impossible to breathe in the other house.