Time Travail

  ***

  Fifteen

  The next day I helped Hanna unload the machines from the Volvo. Harvey was still lying motionless on the sofa in the dead room. We asked him if he wanted the new sensors set up as the old ones had been before. He didn’t answer. We set up the old ones, like toys for a sick child.

  An hour later she went up to the threshold and told him it was time for the hospital. She had to repeat it three or four times. Finally he whispered that it was time but that there would be no more treatments. I was expecting the usual dramatics but long before it reached that stage he got up and followed her to the Volvo, obedient and indifferent.

  When they came back, much earlier than usual, she cursed Harvey and the doctors between sobs. He’d refused the treatment. She was enraged at the doctors for not overpowering him and forcing him to submit to it. It came out that she’d been an attendant in a psychiatric hospital and there they did overpower patients for treatment. Was that where they’d met? She begged me to convince him to keep up the treatment. They said he might not last more than a few months if he didn’t. I did what she asked, what else could I do?

  We got no response. He didn’t go down even once to the cellar and the machine. He inhabited the dead room now, slept on the sofa, ate there when he did eat. When he spoke it wasn’t to us.

  Then it was Friday again. Five o’clock went by uneventfully. Just as it had the Friday before. At half-past five I stopped at the threshold of the dead room. I asked Harvey how he was feeling and reminded him that I hadn’t been paid for the last two weeks. He was still lying on the sofa. He stared in my direction but didn’t seem to see or hear me. The next time I went past the door there was a scrawled message on the threshold. “You took the blueprint. I want it back.”

  I asked him: what blueprint? and spoke about the salary again. He didn’t answer. When I went past again there was another message on the threshold: “Go down in the cellar. See if you can find it there.” I said I’d see about that later maybe but first I wanted to be paid for the past two weeks. Actually, I had no intention of going down in the cellar ever again or crossing over into the dead room.

  An hour later Hanna told me to come with her to the tiny payment room. He’d given the green light but he didn’t attend the ceremony. I’d forgotten the two plastic bags, one for the bills, the other, much sturdier, for the coins. So I had to stuff the bills in one pocket and deposit three pounds of coins in the other.

  I walked towards the cellar-door lopsided. It was a compromise. I went halfway down the stairs. No further. It was cold and dank even there. I peered about for a blueprint down in the red gloom below. Blackprint actually. In that light, blue would show up black. I didn’t see anything. I was about to turn back when I started sneezing. I couldn’t stop. I pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket and maybe a pound of silver with it. The coins cascaded down the steps and rolled about on the cement floor below. I hesitated a second and then went after them very fast. No more than twenty seconds, I said, and held my breath between sneezes as though I were going down into poisonous gas. I kneeled and ran, sneezed, kneeled and ran, sneezed, grabbing them up.

  I saw three quarters and a half-dollar lying near the lead-plated door and then saw the unfolded blueprint, half of it sticking out beneath the door.

  I crouched low as against enemy fire and raised my arm to protect my forehead. Still holding my breath, I dashed for it. On the way back I snatched at the half-dollar with my free hand. I missed it, but not the rough cement. I lunged up the stairs out of range and then out of the cellar.

  I pushed dirty dishes to one side and spread out the ruin on the kitchen table. The paper was limp and ragged. The folds were rifts bridged by yellowed Scotch tape. Even in the conventional light of the kitchen it wasn’t really blue, just the memory of blue like the milky blue of blind eyes. You could hardly make out the rooms under the blotches. The legend was absolutely illegible. It seemed to have been exposed to decades of sun and rain. I knew immediately it couldn’t possibly be the blueprint of the Anderson house.

  Then of what other house? How could it possibly be that? How could he have come up with it forty years after the fire? Where could he have found it? Everything had gone up in the house.

  A sheet of paper was clipped to the other side of the blueprint.

  The colliding houses again but in new overlap.

  The repainted guest room I’d revealed to him that day was encircled in red.

  There was no question mark on this version of overlap, the definitive one, then.

  But how could he know the space of the guest room had once been (still was) occupied by Rachel’s bedroom? How could he read sense into an illegible blueprint? I told myself it was like the sense he made of the jerking posthumous figures on the screen, claiming to have seen them as they’d been when alive, with eyes.

  But wasn’t there more to it than self-delusion? Wasn’t he trying to involve me in his crazy vision? Because of course he’d sent me down to the cellar for that dangerously positioned blueprint knowing I’d look at it and see the definitive localization of his obsession. He must have imagined it was mine too. Projection was a characteristic of sick minds, I knew. The blueprint was somehow a lure. I had trouble formulating the thing clearly.

  I saw the lab below full of black cables crisscrossing like a giant spider-web. I went back to the beginning with questions I should have asked myself then. He’d lured me here with that check. How had he known I’d retired practically penniless? Been retired. Did he know about that too? Who’d told him that?

  I recalled an incident a few weeks before. My pocket address-book was missing. I suspected Hanna. Breathing through the mouth I went into her chaotic room. I didn’t find it. On the table I saw the key to the filing cabinet where she kept my signed salary receipts. Maybe there were other things concerning me there. For instance information about the mysterious salary account. So I went to the tiny room and opened the filing cabinet and looked in the file marked JW. I found nothing on the mysterious salary account.

  But I did find a sheet of paper with the names and addresses and phone-numbers of lots of people I’d known, some from way back. None had been friends, some not even friendly, at least not at the end. I didn’t know what to think about that.

  There were other troubling things, like the promise of a salary absurdly disproportionate to the work I did for him. Anybody could have dismantled junked TV sets and computers for him, even dim-witted Hanna. Not everybody could have been his memory-booster, that was true. But did he really need me for that? Was his memory really as bad as he claimed? He’d recalled the blue-mice episode and the details of what he’d said to me then, thirty years before. He’d accurately recalled distant shack episodes.

  For some reason he wanted to keep me here. To make sure I didn’t leave he’d placed a percentage of the promised salary into an account I’d never seen and which might well be pure invention. Like the promised legacy.

  I saw myself as the victim of obscure manipulations. It went on and on in my mind until I thought of Harvey sniffing spies everywhere and accusing the hospital people of sabotaging his memory. I saw myself in the dead room, imitating him, avoiding non-existent furniture, addressing non-existent people. I remembered Hanna predicting his end for me and later coming after me as she did with Harvey, the way she must have done to the inmates of her hospital, maybe Harvey too then.

  So I pulled back from parallel paranoia. I folded the blueprint up and went to the dead room where he was still lying motionless on the sofa. His eyes were closed. As I placed the blueprint on the threshold I noticed tiny red whorls on the milky blind blue. I’d scraped my fingertips raw on the cement floor trying to recover the coins. I went over to Beth’s house and the room in the red circle.

  “You look awful,” was the first thing she said from the threshold when she got back hours later and stared at me lying on the cot in the newly painted room. “You’ve been in that house again. Don’t say
you haven’t. I can tell.” I confessed I had. Doing what in that house? she wanted to know. I’d already told her I had no more work there. Listening to music. Couldn’t you do that here? Bring your records over here. I know, you don’t think my hi-fi’s good enough. It doesn’t make that much difference, does it? I want you to keep out of that house, Jerry. You keep clear of that house.

  She called it the “honored-guest room” now instead of the junk-room. She was a little less afraid to step inside. I think she’d ended by half-believing what I’d told her that day, that it was a new room now, that the past was the past. She fixed it up for me. She cannibalized other rooms for a carpet, a lamp, an armchair and a bookcase for my books which I brought over from the other house. She got rid of the Venetian blinds and put up curtains. The room was constantly filled with very slightly shopworn flowers she brought back from work.

  The consecration occurred when I bore up to that room with infinite care my components as she’d reluctantly suggested I do. Wherever my hi-fi and CDs and old vinyls were was home, I told her.

  Of course it’s home, she said. Only, whenever she wasn’t there I was to keep the room locked up, also play the music very low and never answer the phone or open the front door if somebody rang. A few hours later I also learned that the room was open to me only for daytime and evening uses and that those uses didn’t include what she’d passively done once (been half-forced to do) on the cot.

  She was surprised I was always lying on my back there when she came back from work. She pulled me out of it by her presence, not knowing she did that. Sometimes I was relieved. Sometimes not. She wondered if I was ill. I said no, just a little tired from jogging. Actually I hadn’t left the room all day long. I couldn’t speak to her about it. I can’t think of it now. I mustn’t.

  There were safeguards. Sometimes they worked. I’d superimpose the burned-down house onto this bigger one. I’d try to persuade myself that the room where I was lying couldn’t possibly correspond spatially with the other room, that it occupied old never-built space and I almost saw the room (this one, Beth’s) traversed by the transient inhabitants of that space, birds from earlier time-levels, lightning-quick tits, thousands of them. All those birds in the small space was suffocating.

  There was another safeguard, a trick which sometimes worked when it got too real. I’d get rid of her in memory the way I had (thought I had) in reality decades before, kneeling on white tiles before a toilet and shredding the only photo I had of her and watching the fragments whirling down and away in that vulgar vortex.

  The third and least ineffective of the safeguards was imagining Beth and me on a big empty beach.

  Once I thought that Harvey had switched the machine on. Somehow it reanimated the dead here. I went over to the other house to make him stop. I found him lying on the dead room sofa with the sensors immobile. Not those lenses but his eyes were slowly moving about the space of the room.

  Back on the new cot in the newly painted room in his own rigid position I thought of the old Ruhmkorff, buzzing away like a rattlesnake, the expanding and collapsing magnetic field of the primary coil inducing high-tension current in the captive secondary coil, those mile-long windings of fine copper wire. For a few minutes I imagined that his brain was generating that time-field, inducing those old memories in mine. Some of his memories couldn’t be so different to start with.

  One afternoon the safeguards didn’t work. I couldn’t imagine us (Beth and me) on an empty beach.

  The thousands of birds didn’t visit the room to stave off the other things in the room.

  Again I kneeled on the white tiles as before a porcelain idol and reduced her to shreds, not her, but the blank back of the photo I’d been careful to hold face down in order not to hurt her a second time. Still, a fragment of her mouth turned up at the last whirling moment, also an eye, a bit of her white neck. There was that temptation to plunge my hand into it and salvage something of her, resisted then, the temptation, but not resisted forty years later in imagination and so I did plunge my hand after her and then arm and shoulder and then all of me sucked down into the vortex as it’s trying to happen now.

  Keep out of it now as I hadn’t then, that day in the newly painted room. It was much worse (or better?) than the previous time-trips. Better, much better. For as long as it lasted. How long did it last? I’d lain down on the bed of the one room at two in the afternoon and had remained in the other room I could have sworn no more than ten minutes when I heard her (Beth) say hey, what’s the matter? and saw her back from work standing in the doorway with daffodils, almost spectral, flowers and woman, a visitation from a less essential temporal plane.

  After the immense pain of rupture and then a return to sense I realized a whole precious afternoon of my diminishing stock of afternoons had passed elsewhere, nowhere finally.

  Badly frightened I reached out for the antidote, the reality of her (Beth) then and there. She protested, then submitted, again with her face averted, eyes open. I resorted to the same inspiration as the first time. At the end she wept again although I’d told her never to do that.

  I said over and over again that I loved her. What we should do was go away together. If not Florida as I’d suggested that night (but she’d thought it was a game) at least for the weekend. Long Island was all beach. She couldn’t do that, she said. I said I wouldn’t stay here. I’d go to the beach by myself. I might not come back, ever.

  Immediately she agreed to come with me. I felt much better. It was as though the poison was already working its way out of my system.

  Beth was the antidote. Sometimes I had the lucidity to wonder what I really wanted. Was it the antidote or the poison? The poison was treacherously sweet like something way back in the past. It started up again, the time-tangent, as I remembered the taste of a certain dangerous lead-compound we’d used in experiments: sweet and fatal. I got lost again in shack memories. Which lead-compound? Lead carbonate? Minium? Maybe an hour went by searching. The thing had to be pursued till the victory of recuperation. Finally victory came. Of course: lead acetate, and almost frighteningly total victory as the formula came intact out of the wreckage of years: Pb (C2H3O2)2. Why had I started thinking of lead? Then I was back to the fatal disease of saturnism and that gave me Saturn again and the Greek for it. But wasn’t it lead, in thick plates, that was supposed to protect us from the rays of the time machine?

  We were to leave for the seaside as soon as she got back from work. I kept out of the room that day but felt the disorder still intact, lurking beneath the frantic surface of household activities and imagined some radical cure from the time sickness just from jogging barefoot in sunshine on flat shining sands, swapping old stale breath for deep lungfuls of antiseptic ocean air. I’d chosen a place way out in Long Island where I’d never been and supposed that no one I’d known had ever been. The beaches were practically empty at that gusty time of year, I knew, except for maybe the odd kite-flyer or surf-caster.

  The radio spoke of possible rain for the weekend, so after we’d registered at a motel and had a disappointing seafood dinner we started in the direction of the sea and finally broke free of the labyrinth of sand-strewn streets with empty summer houses and reached the beach. By then it was night with the moon trying to survive among fast inky clouds.

  For about three minutes we could see the breakers crashing white, the light of a ship at sea, our shadowed footsteps in the wet sand behind us, washed-up crates, tires, bottles, rusty drums, a bloated dog, originally a fox-terrier maybe.

  Then the moon went. It started to drizzle. We couldn’t see anything, just hear the crashing of the breakers and the lap and hiss of the surf at our feet. I was afraid of stepping on the dog. We went back to the motel soaked. Just before she got in bed she said she was sick. At first I didn’t understand.

  We spent the next morning in the motel room looking out of the window. I talked about summer beaches somewhere else as the cold steady rain came down past billboards. I trie
d to convince her to spend two weeks with me at the seaside in June. She said she usually spent her vacation at her sister’s in Phoenix. Martha wasn’t well. Finally I got tired of the billboards and trying to convince her. I lay down on the bed. The ceiling was a blank screen, not like the ceiling in the honored-guest room.

  She remained at the window looking out. She started stealing glances at me.

  “Are you all right, Jerry?”

  “Fine.”

  “Not mad at me?”

  “Why should I be mad at you?”

  The billboards grew brighter and brighter. Suddenly the sun came out.

  “Let’s go back,” she said.

  “Yes, it wasn’t a good idea. It’s too early in the year. You pack up and I’ll check out.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I’d never have said that and spoiled your fun. I meant go back to the beach now that the sun’s out. I’d love to walk along the beach in the sun. I could maybe try to jog with you even.” Her change of mood sounded forced.

  “Jog with all that stuff washed up on the sand? Didn’t you see that dog?”

  “Dogs don’t scare me. I like dogs. Maybe we could find a nice piece of driftwood and you could make a lamp. I’d love to have a real driftwood lamp. What do you say? I’ll do the varnish-job. It’d be nice to have projects together.”

  I didn’t move from the bed. I kept staring up at the blank ceiling. Maybe it was the distance from the overlapped room. Or the presence all night long of Beth. Or maybe something definitive. The cure had worked after all, just walking in the dark alongside the sea had done it. The antiseptic sea air had driven it out of my mind for good.

  The pang at that thought told me it was still with me. Fear and relief now.

  Beth turned away from the window and sat down on the bed. She looked down at me.

  “You talked about nothing else for days and now that you’re here and the sun’s out you just lie there moping on the bed.”

  I said I wasn’t moping. Not feeling all that great, was all. The dinner last night hadn’t agreed with me. I hadn’t slept a wink, I said.

  She felt my forehead, said maybe so, a little, and prepared two glasses of Alka-Seltzer. I asked her if she felt sick herself. She felt fine. Her glass was just to keep me company. She said she’d have thought the sea air would have done me good. But if I didn’t want to I didn’t want to. Where did I want to go then? How about another beach if I didn’t like this one?

  I said I felt like going back to Forest Hill. She put up a short struggle. If you really want to, she finally said. If you’re not feeling well maybe we’d better. She started packing the bag. Misbehavior behind her now, she couldn’t help humming. Often, when there were no cars abreast, she leaned her head against my shoulder.

  Late that evening I found myself in exactly the same position, on my back staring up at the ceiling in the honored guestroom. Beth was unpacking in her bedroom. This ceiling gave the same results as the motel ceiling. The sea air had been powerfully antiseptic. After a while she came in and lay alongside me. I told her I wanted to stay the whole night here. She said we’d spent the whole night together in the motel. I hadn’t meant together here in this room with her but couldn’t say that. I didn’t like the idea of sleeping in the other house, I said. She agreed reluctantly, reminded me that she was sick and came in to join me a quarter of an hour after I’d gone to bed. I couldn’t tell her not to share the room with me.

  She was the antidote, all right, not the sea air, I realized in the darkness.

  In the middle of the night she sat up in bed abruptly.

  Somebody was trying to get in, she whispered. I turned over on the other side. The cot was relieved of her weight. I heard her voice from the other end of the room, a panicked whisper. It was Rick with a friend, I should get up, get dressed, not make any noise. She shook me hard and told me to lock the door here. She’d fix them up on the sofa and the cot downstairs. When they fell asleep I could leave. I knew I knew I knew you shouldn’t have stayed, she kept on saying in a frightened whisper.

  I didn’t answer. She shook me harder. She ended by yanking the sheet and blanket off me and practically pushed me out of bed.

  She slipped into a blue kimono with big white butterflies and went downstairs. She stayed there for a long time. As I dressed I could hear their voices, mainly hers, pleading. At last she came back and said they’d be asleep pretty soon and then I’d be able to go. We waited, each seated on a side of the bed back to back.

  Finally we left the room. She scouted the living room. She gave a conspiratorial “psst!” and I sneaked down the stairs as in vaudeville with a shoe in each hand. When I reached the front door she let me put them back on. She’d switched off the outside lights and all I could see of her was the white oval of her face and the white wings of the kimono butterflies

  Half-asleep, I started stumbling toward her gate. She pulled me behind a forsythia bush. Her breath was coming fast.

  “Jerry, what if he asks for the key and he sees everything? What’ll I say? What’ll I do, Jerry? I can tell him I had the room fixed up for him, sure, but how about that stereo outfit of yours? What’ll I say when he sees that? Listen, I know what. They’ll be fast asleep till noon. An earthquake couldn’t wake them. I know how they operate. Are you listening, Jerry? What I want you to do first thing tomorrow is take your hi-fi back. I’ll give you a hand. Say seven or eight. Promise? Do you promise?”

  I promised and started down the path.

  “My God, the books!” she whispered hoarsely. She pulled me behind the forsythia again. “Suppose he gets up in the middle of the night and sees the books?” She was almost crying. “Wait!” She tiptoed back to the house.

  I must have fallen asleep on my feet. I woke to the nearing crunch of gravel and her painful panting. She was hidden to the nostrils by the swaying pile of books in her arms. She unloaded them on me. “I just took the worst ones, the ones in foreign languages. You’ll have to get rid of all the others tomorrow morning. He’d know I wouldn’t read books like that.”

  The books started spilling over onto the gravel as I tried to negotiate the path for the third time. “Stop making so much noise,” she groaned, picking them up and reloading me. I reached her gate.

  She caught up with me and pulled me behind the sheet-iron Disney deer.

  “Oh Jerry, everything’s going to be fine, you shouldn’t worry. Promise you’ll come over for drinks tomorrow evening. I’ll introduce you as the next-door neighbor. Talk to him about his poems. Only be careful not to say anything about the so-called bad ones, the ones you think are bad. Try to encourage him to go back to poetry. You’ll get along marvelously, I’m sure, he’s very sensitive and intelligent and gentle, don’t worry. So promise. And for God’s sake don’t forget about the hi-fi tomorrow morning, seven sharp.”

  I promised and stumbled past her unannounced visitors’ beat-up unwashed cars. One of them was parked halfway on the sidewalk.

  I struggled with Harvey’s paranoiac padlock, then went past the dark bulk of the memory-tree. At that moment Harvey’s machine erupted into deafening groans. It was almost three in the morning. Hanna’s window lit up instantly. You could see her progress down to the cellar as window after window lit up. She was yelling his name. Now windows in the neighboring houses lit up. I let myself into the dead room. I sniffed. It couldn’t be what I was sure it was. I turned the light on.

  The sofa was empty. The time-sensors were working away. I put the pile of books on the carpet.

  In the corridor leading to the cellar-door I blundered into Hanna. She was barefoot and had her old overcoat on over nothing. It was buttoned wrongly with great loopholes of intimacies. Her hair was wild and she glared at me. Where the hell had I been? She grappled with the door. It was locked from the inside. O God, he was dead.

  If so those were farewell notes tacked on the door. They were encircled in red like my room.

  Not to be disturbed under any pretext. If I don?
??t come up by April 14 at 4:00 pm come down and get me.

  All of the other sheets said the same thing except one that said:

  Where the hell is Jerry?

  She assaulted the door with both fists and cried out his name. Why didn’t he answer? She started whimpering that he was dead to punish her.

  Before I could ask her what had happened she bolted out of the corridor. I followed her to the back of the house. Almost hidden by a dead splintered branch of the elm-tree was a cellar-ventilator with slits. She squatted in front of it and squeezed an eye against one of the slits. What’s he got on his head? Oh Jesus, his eyes, he’s dead. Oh Jesus, those eyes. She howled unbearably.

  Shh, the neighbors, I said stupidly. The neighbors couldn’t help being wide-awake by now. She stood up and ran back to the house.

  I kneeled down and looked through the slit. He was the way she described him. Those eyes.

  What had killed him?

  I remained there on my knees for a while. A thud and an agonized grunt came from inside. I came back just in time to see Hanna taking a running start and ramming the cellar-door with her shoulder. There was a splintering wrenching sound. The door burst open, hanging lopsided on a hinge. She overshot the landing and cartwheeled down the stairs in a chaos of thumps and limbs. She lay still at the bottom for a few seconds.

  I started down. Before I could help her she picked herself up bleeding and moaning. She hobbled over to Harvey where he was sitting, stiff already, at the console. His eyes were turned completely inward. They were white like a statue’s. He was wearing the permanent-wave helmet on his naked skull. His Harpo Marx wig was lying on the cement floor. There were sheets of paper, a pencil and his opened spiral notebook on the console. On the page was a scrawled sentence.

  Trip ten: 11:21 am April 12.

  The same smell as in the dead room. There was also the bottle of white wine and the chipped red goblet for celebrations, half-filled. There was nothing to celebrate, for him. He wasn’t breathing.

  Hanna threw herself on her knees and covered his thighs with kisses, moved her face up into shameful territory. She moaned. How could she do that before a witness? I thought with envy and dismay. Now she gave him a bleeding bear hug of love.

  The helmet slipped off his skull and crashed to the floor. He sat there a rigid statue with his bumpy naked skull reddish in the miserly light of the bulbs. There was an ugly red welt on his forehead. I expected him to slump over to the floor.

  He blinked.

  I blinked back, violently.

  The whiteness turned into bloodshot eyes, back to things outside. He blinked hard again, squinted as though blinded by the cellar-gloom and peered about. Now his eyes tried to focus on us. A minute passed. His face slowly filled with tragic outrage as he continued staring at us. His lips moved soundlessly. Finally he whispered:

  “To return. From that. To this. To you two.”

  There was silence. Then he asked:

  “Time?”

  “Three twenty-two,” I said.

  “Morning or. Afternoon?”

  “Morning.”

  “What date?”

  “The thirteenth.”

  “What month?”

  “April.”

  Hanna was sobbing. Her lank hair wilded over him. Harvey pushed her away feebly. He reached for the pencil and the spiral notebook. His hand was trembling badly. He told her to stop it, to go back to bed. He tried to write. His great nose almost touched the paper. He couldn’t focus here. Hanna painfully started pulling herself up the stairs. She was still sobbing. Yawning, I started stumbling up after her.

  “Not you. I need you. I can’t write.”

  He held out the spiral notebook and pencil impatiently. I returned and took them. I drew up a chair and sat down. He started in.

  Stifling my yawns I tried to take down his account of what was, supposedly, the first voyage of exploration of the past in the history of mankind.

  ***