Page 27 of Time Travail

Twenty One

  So here he is after all that, back at starting point, the dried-blood gloom of Harvey Morgenstern’s cellar. Seated with a runny nose at the console, he stares at the screen as he’s been doing for so long, but this time viewing nothing better than his own face under that recycled permanent-wave helmet. Like a madman in some country, or a criminal in his own, or a universal dunce. All three at the same time?

  His face twitches at him. He twitches back. He realizes he’s just about reached the tether-end of recall and stall. Any moment now he’ll have to go. But where? Via the staircase, up and out and forward? Via the red dispatching button, down and in and back (but maybe black)?

  Theoretically, recall and stall could go on a little longer. Between flight from Beth Anderson’s shambled living room and his present underground position there’d be lots of things to chronicle if the chronicler were in better shape to do the job. Those things are a scramble in his mind except sometimes a little better during spells of lucidity. Which means much worse in another way. Luckily, the spells are less and less frequent. This one, he feels sure, is the last he’ll suffer and he’s on the verge of snapping out of it. He knows the symptoms by now. Lucidity goes as suddenly as it comes.

  But even lucid, chronology’s shot to hell. Everything’s random selection. And the scenes he does manage to salvage are blurred like Harvey’s early images. They’re too close up in time. It’s like presbyopia, a sight defect that worsens with age: far things sharp but can’t focus on near things. JW can see things fifty years back very clearly, the engraving whorls on a 50-centime French stamp or the double-toothed grin of a pumpkin with a candle inside, but not the things that followed eviction from the other house.

  It’s a symptom of the worsening time sickness, he often thinks. Or maybe the side-effects of amplification.

  Logically, one of the first things must be the visit to the hospital. Lying there unconscious, white as the walls, radiating wires and tubes and surrounded by dials, Harvey doesn’t look much different here than down in the cellar. Is he still voyaging? The visitor can see the red welt on his forehead, fainter now. He asks about it. He expects the doctor to confirm electrocution. The doctor doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. Harvey is suffering from heart collapse, he says, not unusual in the terminal stage.

  He dies that night. Harvey betrayed him but JW feels sorry. He doesn’t go to the burning ceremony though. Did Hanna get the ashes along with everything else? Each time he flushes the toilet JW thinks of Harvey and his last wish. Although it wasn’t his idea, JW’s ashamed of the thought, almost to the point of constipation.

  JW still feels sorry even when he finds out (months later that must be) that Hanna inherited everything, even the Schering Plough shares Harvey had practically promised him with no protest on her part. She’d even said Harvey could stick them up his ass. But JW doesn’t get a single Schering Plough share, not even that way. He doesn’t cry over it. Sometimes he laughs and laughs at the idea of harboring a ploughshare that way.

  The will doesn’t matter much to him by then, not even when it turns out that there’s no mysterious account in his name with back pay. So he gets nothing. Practically nothing. A clause stipulates that the “experimental devices” in the cellar are his and that he can continue living in the house until his death when full property of the house will revert to Hanna or her estate.

  That was nice of Harvey. Unless it was posthumous revenge, JW occasionally thinks during bad moments with the machine.

  He can’t recall if this is before or after the hospital visit but he remembers getting up before dawn and sneaking over to her house. She must have got someone to clear out that room. All of Harvey’s stuff is there piled up alongside the ash-can near the street lamp. The salvaged tinkered objects have accomplished their mortal cycle from garbage back to garbage, ashes to ashes. There are the four cables, mutilated now. She must have hacked them off at the holes in the fence where they trespassed on her property. There’s the portable switchboard, the relay, the portable monitor, the time-cassettes, the permanent wave helmet that killed him (he’s convinced of this no matter what the doctor said or will say). There’s even a cardboard box full of red bulbs. Also his fedora.

  JW steps over her friendly symbolic white wood fence. Her Chevy isn’t there and the windows of the house are in white mourning with drawn curtains and drapes. He guesses she’s gone to her sister’s for real now. Still, he looks up nervously at her bedroom window when the driveway gravel crunches underfoot. He leaves her keys under the mat and goes behind the house.

  It’s dark but he can make out the ladder, still propped up under the opaque window. That’s a good sign. Maybe nobody’s been here since the lynching episode. But as the sky lightens slowly he sees that there’s no blue denim jacket anywhere. Couldn’t the wallet have slipped out of the breast pocket? He looks and looks. He finds his damp left shoe under a lilac bush.

  He starts lugging all of Harvey’s stuff into the house, to punish his heart he tells himself. At the end he’s dizzy and sweating but his heart goes on beating and beating. It doesn’t miss a beat. Panting, he goes to the back of the house. He searches methodically in the high weeds, particularly in front of the cellar ventilation opening where the four cables are still pouring out uselessly, and around the lopsided elm, and also the spot where he pitched forward onto the empty beer bottles. All he finds are more beer bottles and beer caps.

  For weeks he turns Hanna’s house upside down from cellar to attic, the closets again, the bathrooms, Hanna’s room, his bedroom, even the ripe garbage pail, explored with wet stinking hands. Who could have taken it? Ricky and his gang? If so, where can he locate them? Hanna? She’s the prime suspect. The others couldn’t cash the check. All Hanna had to do was rip it up and be $84,000.30 richer. But he doesn’t know where to locate her either. When he returned from the hospital he’d found her closet and drawers yawning and empty. All she’d left were moldering pizzas in the refrigerator and intimate black hairs near the shower drain. Anyhow, would she have listened to his pleas?

  He tries to phone Beth. The phone rings on and on as he expected it would. Her windows are still in white mourning. One drizzly pre-dawn day he sneaks over to her house for the second time. He feels deep guilt as he recovers the key under the mat. He tries to insert it and discovers the lock has been changed. He experiences relief from the guilt, but then deep depression. He goes back to bed fully dressed.

  He writes her a long letter of justification. He says that, appearances to the contrary, he was as much a victim as she was. Until things got crazily out of control he’d faithfully followed her instructions regarding the plants and the goldfish. He is as emotionally annihilated by the events as she must be and in addition very nearly suffered a heart attack.

  He says that he loves her deeply and explains about the house near the beach for the two of them, which was why he’d let Harvey install those machines. It was for her birthday. He has trouble making the beach sound real even to himself.

  In a long PS he says that he left his blue denim jacket somewhere in her house. Probably in the Mexican nook but maybe in one of the bathrooms. If not there then in the living room or the kitchen. He adds that she’ll find a wallet in the inside breast pocket and what he wants her to do is this: take out all the money (over $3,000) and keep it as compensation for the damage to her living room although that damage, as explained above, wasn’t really his fault. She could, if it’s not too much trouble, drop the wallet in Harvey’s mailbox in case she doesn’t want to see him immediately after what happened.

  He drops the letter in her mailbox. It’s full of junk mail. She’s still away in Phoenix. Or is it LA?

  He never gets a reply to that letter. Not even something hopeful like the letter returned unopened. That’s communication of sorts. Maybe when she got back she did get rid of the unopened letter but in her garbage pail along with the other junk mail.

  He sends her two other letters, much lat
er likely. In the first he probably repeats himself a little about responsibility for the events but accepting more of it and also about his deep love even though by this time that’s become a little unreal too, like the beach. Traveling and voyaging a lot, he’s become pretty indifferent to other things. He tells her that she doesn’t have to bother returning the $5,000 he lent her for the lawyer.

  In the third letter, written months later in a bad moment after the dog fiasco he encloses a $5,000 check. When he goes outside for the first time in weeks to drop the letter in her mailbox he discovers that her nameplate has disappeared. The drapes and curtains have disappeared from the windows too. The house stares vacantly like a dead man.

  So he keeps the letter with the check. It had been a sincere gesture. His bank account is back to a little over $10,000. He has no old age dependency insurance. It’s true he doesn’t have to worry about rent, won’t have to for the rest of his life.

  One rainy dark-blue evening there’s a sudden yellowish dog pissing against the elm. How did it get in? Under or over the fence? An underdog, unmistakably, with those dog-eared ears and mournful yellowish eyes. It wags its clotted tail at the sight of JW as though grateful for not being kicked but retreats when he tries to pet it. JW fills a dish with scraps of meat and noodles left over from his last meal and intended for his next. The dog sniffs it once and turns away. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he reminds the animal and goes back inside.

  The next day the plate’s empty. After a few more shared meals the dog allows JW to pet it. Soon it agrees to come inside. It lies alongside the sofa for a while without disturbing the trips except when sometimes it has senseless fits of happiness and its tail thumps on the floor. JW gets into the habit of leaving the front door ajar for the dog’s comings and goings.

  One day, he can’t remember when, Ricky comes over with the audio outfit in his car. He’s visibly in bad need. He claims he forced José to give it back. For his pains he wants $2,000 for it, then $1,000, and so on down to $500. Absolutely last price: $300. He’d have gone down to the price of a fix but JW gives him $100 even though music means nothing to him now.

  JW doesn’t even bother mentioning the wallet. What for? Anyhow, he’s finally realized that if Ricky or one of the gang had found the wallet they’d have already held him up for the check. It’s Hanna for sure.

  Ricky wants to talk about his mother. She refuses to see him. He says that he loves her and never kicked her. He weeps. JW’s not really interested in that subject either. The thought doesn’t even occur to him to ask where she’s living now. He finds it hard to talk about anything. He’s anxious to get back to the cellar. The last person he’s talked to more than five seconds was the owner of the wine and liquor store who’d run out of Lord’s Vineyards. That was maybe two weeks ago.

  Ricky wants to talk about The Golden Galaxy. JW doesn’t. What suddenly JW wants to talk about is joints. The machine doesn’t perform well at all, maybe because the images aren’t amplified enough on the receiving end, he thinks. He’s in no condition to get the stuff on his own. The price Ricky asks is a rip-off but JW doesn’t feel like haggling.

  So Ricky regularly supplies him with what he, JW, had once procured for Harvey thanks to Mr Venezelous. Ricky comes about once a month with the stuff in a scholarly briefcase that contrasts with his tattered faded jeans, his dirty long hair and scuffed high-heeled mother-kickers. He wants to talk to JW but each time JW gives him the money fast in the vestibule and practically has to push him out.

  That goes on for quite some time. Then Ricky disappears, for months it must have been, because JW has to depend exclusively on the California sauterne for the amplifier effect, his stomach remembers that constantly.

  Every so often he pampers himself with a joint on the sofa. But he’s careful not to touch what he’s hoarded up for the big voyage if one day he dares.

  One afternoon the bellowed name of Jesus destroys a trading session with Charlie Schultz. JW was on the sofa reconstructing the illustration of Gettysburg, number 67 or 76 of the bubble-gum cards, the Great Battles series, perfect smoke wreaths about cannon muzzles, raised sabers, joyous crimson splotches on gray and blue uniforms.

  It’s travel. Travel’s upstairs on the sofa and unlimited. Voyages are down in the cellar, strictly limited and less pleasant but more authentic.

  Weeping on the threshold of the living room in dramatic black, Hanna seems to fill the whole house. She has the key to the house (technically hers) in her hand. He’d ignored the doorbell as he always did, the doorbell and the telephone bell.

  “Jesus, I thought it was Harv for a second there, first that smell then you on the sofa,” she says and totters to the striped armchair. It twangs under her weight, emits dust and stuffing. She wipes her eyes and asks about it, also about the flowered one facing it, and the tarnished oval mirror framed by gilt rosebuds.

  JW takes a final lip-searing drag and reluctantly says that he found them up in the attic. His voice sounds unfamiliar. He doesn’t use it much except to himself a little and then practically a whisper, he’s so close. He concedes the information that he nearly smashed the mirror negotiating it down the steep stairs. It’s too long to say but he thinks: that would have been seven years of bad luck, so an assurance of relative longevity. Was that the bad luck involved? Someone had once made that wise point. Who?

  Hanna explains that she’s come for the big TV set in her room. She’s brought along her brother to help her. JW has to get up and meet him. He’s standing before the front door, smoking, a tiny bald Latin-type with a wispy moustache and a bright blue suit. He smiles brilliantly and goes back to the beat-up Volvo for something. She got the Volvo too.

  Hanna discovers three bottles of Budweiser in the refrigerator. Legally they’re probably hers too. Sitting down she looks around and crinkles up her pug nose and comments on the dirt and mess in the kitchen. In the brief pause between her second and third bottles JW feels obliged to allude to the problem of the check. He reminds her of that day Harvey gave him an $84,000.30 check.

  As soon as JW mentions Harvey’s name she bursts into tears. She brings out: “He was the great love of my life.” JW briefly tries to console her and returns to the check. When he explains that he’s lost it she stops blowing her nose and stares at him. He expects her to howl and shriek with laughter. Instead, she repeats: “The great love of my life,” and starts sobbing again.

  He gives it up. She and the tiny Latin type cart the TV set away. JW returns to the sofa but can’t bring back bubble-gum Gettysburg. So he travels somewhere else in early childhood.

  He spends a great deal of his time on the sofa traveling wherever he wants to. Sometimes also where he doesn’t want to. He voyages a lot too down in the cellar, machine-assisted, but mainly to flooring-cracks, doorknobs and carpet fringes, in what Harvey called the random mode. Those things are authentic all right but JW would prefer people, even eyeless and fuzzy. The only recognizable human being he can visit is on the first experimental time-cassette: Miss Forster with her broken-toothed smile.

  The amateurish way he operates it, he can’t impose on the machine his own preference for people over things. The machine has no preference one way or the other. People were a tiny fraction of what the living room contained and they came and went. Things were faithful to that space and stayed put. So the law of probability gives JW faithful things over a period of forty years. Not a single image of his mother talking to Mrs Morgenstern with her worried lips shaping his name. Not even Harvey vertical and young or decades later horizontal in gradual death.

  JW feels lonely down in the cellar even though he often has the yellowish dog there. He’d settle for anybody on the screen, the Negro maid, the Fuller Brush man, even the reform rabbi. But he doesn’t know how to navigate to them. Why hadn’t Harvey left him instructions? he often thinks bitterly. He promised to. What was the point of letting him have the machine if there are no instructions?

  One night JW finally t
ries to view the first of the two time-sequences from the burned-down house. The label bears a practically illegible scrawl: “Rebecca, living room, late May 1943, X 40.” At the end the poor bastard couldn’t even get her name right. X 40 means that, helmeted, you get a time-ratio of 40 seconds of there-time for every second of here-time.

  When JW, unhelmeted of course, inserts it and presses the red button, his heart chaotic, all that swims up on the screen from the burned-down living room is a big horizontal luminous blotch that he guesses is the sofa because there are vertical luminous blurs on it that are probably seated people. JW thinks of their home-built Newton reflecting telescope with Andromeda still a luminous blur at X 200. Andromeda, coming, is over two million light years away. These luminous blurs, less than fifty sun-circling years gone, are much further than that.

  He constantly wonders why Miss Forster and the humping dogs on the first experimental time-cassettes are relatively clear while the image on this perfected one is a hopeless blur. Is some special sequencing necessary? JW remembers how Harvey complained about blur that night and sent him over to his house in search of a red notebook for the solution. But wasn’t that a trick to get him out of the virtual house?

  Or had Harvey’s final voyage – the one that had monopolized his brain for decades and maybe even motivated the time-machine in the first place – had that final voyage been just to this blur before blackness? After all that fuss and bother?

  The second time-cassette is labeled, “Rebecca’s bedroom, late June 1945.” That imprecise date encompasses her (Rachel, not Rebecca) and also fire. The time-ratio is a suicidal X 8000. JW laboriously calculates: at that ratio a minute here was worth about five and a half days there assuming Harvey wasn’t electrocuted instantly. If he held out an hour it was almost a year but maybe in fire.

  Even safely bareheaded it takes JW months to dare press the red button. When he does, the screen fills with total luminous blur. Sometimes JW wonders again if that wasn’t what Harvey had visited for five and a half days or a year. Sometimes though he believes that correct sequencing can pull her out of blur. But what sequencing? All those dials and figures and symbols and needles and red zones, all those knobs and buttons and switches.

  At some time the idea occurs to him that maybe the promised navigational instructions lie waiting for him behind the lead-armored door where the master machine is. The idea grows and grows like a brain-tumor after he finds the lock combination scrawled on a scrap of paper beneath the console. Was it a memory aid for Harvey? Or was JW meant to find it? He doesn’t dare enter. He’s scared of irradiation, he tells himself, although that’s not a logical fear if the machine is switched off.

  Finally one day (or night), he amplifies his courage and pushes open the heavy lead door. Banks of mercury tubes overhead stutter into crude blinding light. To illuminate what? The narrow windowless vault is practically empty. Just there in the left-hand corner a repetition of the outside set-up: a miniature TV screen and a black box the size of a dog-kennel with a miniature lead-plated door. There’s another, much smaller, combination lock on it. The same combination? He doesn’t want to try. If you open that door and crawl inside won’t you find yourself in another, smaller, glaring vault with another, smaller, door and so on and so on, a doll’s nest of successive miniaturizations? And you successively miniaturized with each passage till no bigger than the doll zombies that jerked eyeless across the screen, yourself one of them? JW’s jagged or stoned of course.

  There’s also the shelf in the glaring vault and on it two notebooks. He saw only one notebook on the shelf that time he surprised Harvey coming out of the dark space and warning him of the consequences of poking around there.

  JW pokes around. He opens the top notebook and suffers consequences even if not the announced ones. There he is, JW, black on white. Very black. It’s a distorted résumé of his life. He refuses to recognize himself (referred to as “J”) in those distortions any more than long ago in that jubilant trick-mirror of the 42nd St Laugh Movie, pinheaded and macrophallic at seventeen. Harvey got lots of the bare brute facts right, the dates and names accurate too. But all those details and interpretations, pages and pages of them, are basically lousy gossip, lies, nearly all of them lies. So many of them lies. It’s like reading a malevolent obituary on yourself. The biography’s clearly based on loose malevolent talk. Who were his informants? He thinks of the names on the sheet of paper in the JW file in the filing cabinet in the tiny payment room. Not a single kind or forgiving word?

  The last twenty or so pages in the notebook confirm that the distortions of his image, most of them anyhow, come from the gross aberrations in the reflecting surface. JW sees himself cast in the role of potentate over girl after girl. Harvey remembered some of their names from nearly half a century back, a prodigious feat of memory, better even than JW with his innocent stamps. It’s a defective playback of the stories of times with those girls that Harvey had paid to hear, but stripped of the original elegance and tenderness, details of ugly exploits in the crudest of language that JW could never have used.

  In the sweat and heat of action sometimes the potentate becomes “I” instead of “J”. Or is that a confusion of the two similarly shaped letters?

  Those girls are minor partners, warming-up exercises for the major partnership in school toilets, empty classrooms, library stacks, the bedroom. The German lesson Harvey had commanded her to give JW in her bedroom turns out to have been another kind of lesson. “How did it go?” he’d asked JW. “How was he?” he’d asked her. Their truthful answer hadn’t satisfied him. Is that the way he saw her, doing things like that, allowing things like that to be done to her?

  There are three pages on it. JW breaks off at the first symptoms of guilty response to it.

  There are the movies too, the off-screen scenarios of the three movies they’d gone to together on his order. How could Harvey have convinced himself that he knew what (as they sat supposedly side by side in darkness with the gilt stars in the blue dome overhead) JW’s hand had been doing? JW almost protests aloud in the glaring empty vault: there’d been an old man between them the first time, a whole row of occupied seats the second time, and the third time, yes, his hand, but on her dry inert hand for a few seconds.

  At the top of the third page from the end he reads: “On June 28, 1945 he came to the house when everybody was away. Momma shouldn’t have asked him to.” What follows is a monotonous replay of the German lesson in that room except for bloodshed at the end and the last sentence: “Then he set fire to the house.”

  JW closes that notebook and after a while opens the other. It’s what he’s been looking for. He leaves the vault and the cellar with the two notebooks. He takes the crazy one into the bathroom and methodically starts ripping out the pages, crumpling them up and flushing them away, three at a time. When the final white balls go whirling down he feels weepy but it’s not as bad as he thought it would be. He goes upstairs to bed.

  The next day he sits down at the kitchen table with paper and pencil and plunges into the promised navigational simplifications of the second notebook. His mind is inhabitually clear of agents of amplification. The notebook’s full of simplifications all right, like the repeated painstaking identification of the red button: “third from left, top row” although that button is the only one that’s red. Things are underlined heavily for JW’s benefit, sometimes in red ink with marginal posthumous wisecracks like: “I think a six-year-old could grasp this simple operation. So assuming you have one to consult, let’s go on to the next step.”

  There are steps after steps after steps, criss-crossing flights of steps leading to blank impenetrable walls or breaking off on void. In this void JW often hears, echoing, Harvey’s judgment: “You haven’t got the mathematical basis.”

  For weeks he ponders and sweats over the simplified navigational formulas. It’s like being back in Mr Weintraub’s class except he can’t cheat by looking at Harvey Morgenstern’s paper because th
is is Harvey Morgenstern’s paper already.

  He goes to the public library and takes out all the books on math he can find. He understands nothing and goes to a bookshop specializing in elementary and high school textbooks. He practically buys the bookseller out. No false pride. Nothing’s too simple for him. He wants to make sure his foundations are sound. So the first books JW tackles are for seven-year-olds. He blitzes through them. Harvey spoke of JW’s inferiority to six-year-olds in the field. It’s a minor triumph. It’s also a satisfaction to think that he could have easily graduated primary school with an A in arithmetic. B+ for sure.

  But high school algebra proves to be the familiar blank impenetrable wall of forty years before. He can read three foreign languages and in the days when he still had music in him could whistle the lento assai of the Beethoven opus 131 from beginning to end but he’s a slobbering idiot before those symbols. He feels the old bitter frustration rising in him.

  It isn’t a total waste of time though. If JW still can’t navigate he understands enough to improve the quality of the images. The flooring-cracks and doorknobs in the second Morgenstern living room are much clearer now. The blurs of the living room of the first Morgenstern house on the time-cassette have condensed unmistakably into three people sitting on a sofa. You can’t tell who they are, not even whether man or woman, but it’s progress.

  On the image of the second cassette, labeled as her bedroom in late June 1945, he thinks he can make out a horizontal luminous blur on the right-hand side of the screen. On the left-hand side a vertical luminous blob. It floats toward the horizontal blob and after a while merges with it. JW plays the sequence hundreds of times but extracts no more than that. He begins wondering if reasonably sharp focus isn’t obtainable only through time-travel with the helmet. But he doesn’t dare entrust his head to that murderous device.

  He decides to experiment. The idea is to set the knobs at a very low time-ratio and quickly touch the springed metal forehead clamps. When he starts adjusting those knobs he discovers that they turn freely without the resistance of engaged elements inside. The knobs apparently communicate with nothing. They’re like the knobs on a toy imitation of some complex adult apparatus.

  He plugs the helmet in and touches the forehead clamps like something white hot. All he gets is the faintest of tingles. The tingle remains a tingle even at X 200, even at X 9000. But index fingers are one thing, temples and forehead another.

  One evening, totally amplified, JW finds himself luring the yellowish dog with a frozen lambchop to the plugged-in helmet set at X 200. He’s in bad need of an extra pair of hands to crown the whining yelping struggling dog. It breaks loose and bolts up the cellar stairs in three howling leaps. Sitting on the floor JW reflects that anyhow the size of the helmet would have required a much bigger dog to test it on. Also all that rough hair would have insulated the animal. A Mexican hairless? Far too small. And where can you find a stray Mexican hairless this far north? Now JW imagines the yellowish dog helmeted at the console and joining the humping dog sequence at X 9999. JW starts laughing and laughing at the thought of canine pornography.

  When he pulls himself together and out of the cellar with the thawing lambchop the dog is gone. He never comes back. JW misses him but consoles himself by reflecting that he won’t have to leave the front door ajar anymore. It’s winter by then and there are drafts. He leaves it ajar anyhow for quite a long time. When he finally closes it he feels deeply depressed and writes his last letter to Beth Anderson, thinking she still occupies that house.

  One evening in some month or other at 10:23 the doorbell wakes him up. He gets out of bed and negotiates the stairs down to the door although normally he never answers the doorbell. It’s no time of day – night, actually – to be visiting people, he grumbles as he opens the door. When she sees him clearly she gives a little cry and says, “Mr Morgenstern, what have you done with Professor Weizman?” It’s a bad joke and he starts closing the door on her. “Please take this and give it to him,” she says, thrusting her usual bouquet of shopworn flowers at him. “Say it’s from me. Why doesn’t he phone?”

  When the door shuts on her JW is angered to see that the flowers are worse than shopworn: fit for the garbage-pail. He throws them on the floor and goes back to bed. In the morning he doesn’t see the flowers where he thought he threw them. He looks all over, even in the garbage pail. It sticks its tongue out at him with a mottled banana-peel. He’ll have to get around to emptying the pail. He pokes about in it but doesn’t find the flowers. By then he doesn’t expect to.

  He’s forgotten her phone number and has to look it up. A woman’s voice tells him Mrs Anderson moved five months ago, she doesn’t know where. The vacant stare of the house comes back to him now. But that couldn’t be five months ago, could it? He can’t find her new address in the phone book. Finally he realizes the phone book’s ten years old. Maybe she’s moved to Phoenix or LA. She could be anywhere. Ricky knows where she lives but Ricky hasn’t come for months. He wishes he’d come. The California sauterne’s wrecking his stomach.

  The next time JW goes shopping (which is about once a month) he passes in front of Dave and Tom’s but doesn’t see her through the plate glass window. A month or so later on the way to the supermarket again, he goes inside. She isn’t there. It’s too much bother asking about her but he feels he has to justify his presence so he buys the cheapest bouquet they have – something like daisies but with a colored heart – and when he gets back with all the groceries he sticks the flowers on the little round table near the door and forgets about them. One day he sees them there, fit for the garbage pail, which is where he puts them.

  One night JW dreams he’s time-traveling down in the cellar and has Rebecca almost in focus when there’s a terrific banging somewhere upstairs. He thinks it’s the elm in a storm. But now it comes in triple tattoos, too fast to be the branch. He dreams he leaves the cellar and opens the front door. It’s the woman next door, the one with the tulips. Her fist is raised for another tattoo or to strike him. She stares at him in theatrical horror. “What’s happened to you? You’ve got roaches on you.” It doesn’t bother him anymore. They could inscribe whatever they liked on his stone. But it was meant as an insult.

  He pushes her away from the door as hard as he can and insults her back. He locks the door, double-bolts it. He dreams he can hear her crying from the other side of his safely bolted door, ringing and hammering again. To escape it he goes upstairs to bed and has dreams within that dream. They’re even worse, involving his dead son.

  Violent stomach pain wakes him up. He needs solid food. He remembers there’s no food in the house. He’ll have to confront the glare of the sky and go shopping. When he tries to open the door he finds it locked and double-bolted, something he never does, anyhow doesn’t remember doing.

  One day the doorbell rings with unusual persistence. JW’s on his sofa. It finally stops. It always does sooner or later. Immediately after, though, there’s a sharp rapping on the window. The intruder, distorted by the dirty panes into something like a bad time-image, makes urgent obscure gestures and vanishes. The doorbell resumes.

  JW gets up, opens, stares and finally recognizes the transformed visitor and backdrop. JW remembers that the last time he opened the door on him ragged and sullen it was cold and white outside. It’s hot and green now and there he stands, a forward time-traveler from the corny fifties with a button-down collar, quiet tie, a suit (who wears suits now?) with sharply creased trousers breaking perfectly on shiny shoes, a short haircut, a persistently ecstatic smile. That smile is the thing that disguises him most of all. JW almost smiles ecstatically himself.

  “It’s about time,” he says in an excited rusty voice and guides Ricky through the mess to the flowered armchair. He tells him to wait. He goes upstairs and brings back the money. The other counts it carefully, inscribes the amount in a neat black address-book, places the money in a buff envelope and the envelope on his lap. He reinforces his smi
le and takes out of the briefcase a jewel-case with stars on the lid, a funny disguise for the stuff.

  He opens it, revealing three rings on violet plush. One of the rings is formed by entwined snakes with red eyes. All three rings look familiar. “Please choose, Professor Weizman. Two hundred dollars more and you can have two, twice the spiritual force.”

  JW lunges forward and snatches the money back. “I want the stuff,” he mumbles, perhaps imploringly. Ricky goes on smiling. He puts the jewel case back in the briefcase and pulls out a sheaf of leaflets. “No charge, of course.” He withdraws his shiny shoe quickly from the path of a survivor roach and launches into mystical gibberish. JW’s heard it all before. He stares at his briefcase and mutters: “Cut the shit. Give me the stuff.”

  All the new Ricky has are the rings and more leaflets. He speaks of rebirth, cites himself as an example of it, urges it upon JW. JW orders him out of the house. Before he goes (smiling even more intensely) he leaves his mother’s address and phone-number. “She would like so much to hear from you, Professor Weizman. We all would. I’ll be back.”

  Each time he comes, constantly now it seems, it’s the same story. In his corny 1950 uniform, with his intense mad smile, he holds aloft his briefcase to lure JW into widening the crack of the front door into wide welcome. “Wonderful things for you Professor Weizman!” JW always widens the crack on the off chance that the briefcase contains the uncosmic veil-of-reality-lifting stuff he’s craving to fuel his voyages with. He ended by offering double the usual rip-off price, then triple.

  He sullenly convoys his impeccable visitor through the minefield of disorder and dirt to the dead room. Where of course the nut pulls out his mystical shit. He’s incorruptible. He talks about his mother’s spiritual progress. “We’re guiding her.” JW guesses that “we” is Ricky and his father. He feels faintly sorry for her but sorrier for himself, constantly tricked that way.

  Ricky has new conversion tactics. He’s given up frontal assault in favor of flank harassment. Each time he comes he speaks about a great InGathering (“perhaps the very last”) scheduled soon at Coney Island. Does Corny Island still exist? “We would very much like you to come,” Ricky says. He urges JW to fight free of Glauk and his Veil of Irreality even while JW feebly pushes him out of the house. “Thank you, thank you,” he says as the door slams shut on him.

  JW had completely forgotten Coney Island. He returns to the sofa and only half-succeeds in riding the Ferris Wheel with his parents. He tries hard to imagine the crowds on Coney Island beach way back. He can’t go beyond abstract knowledge of their swarming existence. He tries and tries. Something’s wrong.

  Failure to repossess new fragments of the past contaminates the old ones. Things start going wrong with the trips. Memories once possessed elude him. He can’t picture the stamps or the bubblegum cards. His mother’s face near the hump-backed radio refuses to materialize. He can’t hear her scandalized joyous throat-sound. The ceiling screen overhead gives him nothing but its network of cracks. He finds himself evicted into the trivial and meaningless present. He wanders about the house aimlessly, sleeps enormously but poorly. He clings to the hope that it’s cyclic and that after this blankness he’ll be able to travel again.

  One day he returns to the first experimental time-cassettes after a long absence and discovers that Miss Forster has grown dim. So have the dogs in bucking expressionless union. In the other living room Rachel – whichever one of the three presumed persons on the presumed sofa she may be – is fading for good. She’s never emerged out of blur, but as blur she’s fading too. JW recalls that Harvey had spoken of this impermanence of the time-cassettes. But soon he realizes that the other images directly pumped out of the dead room upstairs are going too. Everything is going.

  One night, appalled by the accelerating decomposition of doorknobs and his teacher’s smile, he opens the box with the small hoard set aside for the helmeted voyage he’s kept putting off. He does it for courage as well as for amplification. He coifs the helmet at X 200 for her bedroom with that fading vertical blur merging with the fading horizontal blur.

  On the very threshold of entry, forefinger rigid on the red dispatching button, he’s caught by lucidity and doesn’t dare. It’s not the first time. He removes the helmet, consumes more of the hoard, lurches upstairs and tries again to crack Harvey’s navigational simplifications. Suddenly everything makes sense to his luminous mind. He almost breaks his neck storming down the cellar steps.

  He’s like a cross-handed virtuoso over the electronic keyboard. He produces not useless music but precious things in marvelous clarity: the cat, the salesman, the rabbi, the maid, even something new, Harvey in his early thirties. Harvey seems to be staring solemnly at him. He slowly smiles as in encouragement.

  Finally JW gets his mother and Mrs Morgenstern in their time-renovated armchairs but as never before: in sharp focus, color and dimension. He’s not a victim of random selection anymore. He can concentrate on his mother’s face and even stop the image on her hazel eyes.

  Joyful at having at last seen her eyes, he solicits the first of the two time-cassettes from the burned down house before fire. With no need for the perilous helmet, he sees Rachel emerging from blur. She was (had been) the middle figure on the sofa. She’s wearing a blue blouse with a little-girl collar and a blue ribbon in her hair and is looking at television. Once she looks his way and, unbearably lovely, smiles. He stops her image on that smile. He can almost believe she sees him. It must be Harvey entering the room. He falls asleep over that image. When he awakes, the time-cassette has unwound to the end and the screen’s blank.

  He closes his eyes. Loved-ones and precious things come back that way too. He sees, with unprecedented authenticity, Momma and Poppa leaning toward the big square radio, listening to the poor shit blubbering out his sins. Mr Anthony’s voice, warm and consoling, tells him to return to the source of forgiveness. Thank you, thank you, Mr Anthony.

  Things completely forgotten come back. He remembers the contents of the second stamp album his mother had offered him for Christmas a year after the sale of the first one: the Penny Black with backward-gazing young Victoria on it, the US 1847 Five-Cent Franklin, the US 1876 Commemorative. The bubblegum Great Battle cards come back too with marvelous detail and color: Stalingrad, The Liberation of Paris, The Battle of the Bulge.

  Now a skilled sequencing summons Keith to the screen. It’s a wonderfully clear image in three-dimensional color. He’s nicely dressed and looks great. JW tells him so. He doesn’t greet his father or smile but he keeps on staring at him, there can be no doubt about that. Which proves Harvey was wrong, he thinks jubilantly, when he said that if we can see them they can’t ever see us. Because Keith sees JW all right, keeps staring at him, disapprovingly. JW feels ashamed of his wrinkled stained clothes and unshaven face, the empty bottles and joint-butts. He feels like telling Keith he shouldn’t judge his father too harshly the way his father had once judged him. Still, JW feels so glad to see his son looking that great even if it’s humiliating to be seen by him the way he (JW) is.

  Then he senses something wrong. It focuses painfully. Keith’s never been in this house, it’s not possible, he was never within the catchment-area of the machine. He starts fading. JW says, don’t go, but he goes.

  That pulls him out of it into total emptiness. The other acquisitions have gone too. He can’t picture his mother’s face, can’t remember the sound of her scandalized joyous throat sound. Now he recalls that in that last vision of her the radio was square and Mr Anthony’s voice consoling. But that radio had been humpbacked. And Mr Anthony never offered absolution. Inauthentic a second time, his mother in the striped armchair. Her eyes were (had been) blue, not hazel. He remembers too that there’d never been a second stamp album after the first one. He’d never possessed those precious longed-for issues like the 1847 Five-Cent Franklin and the 1876 Commemorative. JW remembers that the bubble-gum cards with Charlie Schulz had been years before Stalin
grad, The Liberation of Paris and The Battle of the Bulge. Also that television had been commercialized after the war. How could Rachel have been looking at television during the war?

  He revolts at that inauthenticity, sacrifices the rest of the hoard, crowns himself with the helmet set at X 9999 and inserts the second of the two time-cassettes from the burned down house hours from fire. Forefinger on the red dispatching button he takes a mental running start and supplies the prelude to what he longs and fears to see.

  The handsome Greek-profiled youth struggles again down the street to the Morgenstern house, as promised, with flapping flannel trousers, maintaining his golden hair against the gale, practically a hurricane, assailed by skittering cans, ash-can covers, wrenched-off branches from the roaring trees. He reaches the front door.

  The aging observer stops the mental image and so time, leaving the other immobile, kneeling before the doormat as in long prayer. The observer hesitates and then allows the other to remove the key, open up and go through the dark living room. Rachel is sitting in the sofa alongside Mr Morgenstern. It’s contamination from an earlier memory. He reestablishes the empty living room and allows the other to go up the stairs, allows him to go down the dark corridor to her door, to knock and knock, to call her name. As he pushes open the door, on the threshold now, he splices memory and return to the authentic thing by pressing the red dispatching button.

  He survives it. The vertical blur on the screen condenses into the handsome youth recalled a second before on the threshold. Now beyond the threshold after all this time, the door closed behind him, he gazes at the horizontal blur already condensed into Rachel in pajamas, propped up against pillows, her cat alongside her, a button-eyed doll on each side of her head. On the side-table there are stacks of paper, pencils, a pencil sharpener, a bottle of cough syrup and the photograph with her parents standing in the snow and smiling for the lens, she between them, looking up at her towering father. Sheets of paper with equations cover her lap in disorder. A crow’s wing of dangling hair half conceals her chalky face as she stares down at the book. She doesn’t look up.

  Now the peripheral cellar fades, also the housing-unit of the screen and transfer occurs in color and dimension. He is totally in that room as the golden-haired youth approaches her. The cat’s eyes observe him cold and yellow. Going toward her he wills stoppage of forward process. Time obediently halts. He allows it to resume.

  When the young man touches her shoulder in timid consolation, she looks up from the book with immense eyes and he gets a torrent of words, more than she’s ever said to him in two years, but in German. It’s no correcting echo of his own laboriously constructed phrases. He can’t understand a word. It goes on and on.

  He places his arm about her shoulder and sits down on the edge of the bed, comforting her. Now he takes her in his arms like something made of spun glass. He tries to stop process for the promised five years in this pure joy. He gets maybe five seconds.

  Process resumes, unbearably. Looking, he endures it as she endures it. If one or the other, let it be electrocution, not the 1: 9999 time-ratio, not five years of this. Random selection rescues him for a while. In great close-up the cat, fled to a corner, stares at him with cold yellow eyes. On the carpet now, the cracked face of the button-eyed doll. On the bedside table the upset bottle with cough syrup oozing out over the papers. Other sheets of paper scattered on the carpet with incomprehensible equations, hundreds of them, an unending confusion of symbols.

  Now he returns to her, is returned to her. What if the five-year stasis should be this: limp and weeping where he’s carried her to the chair? On the carpet the laundry bag. He begs and then commands her to stop weeping. Aware that it’s half past eleven he panics at the sound of an approaching car.

  He guides her back to the bed with the fresh sheet. He notices that her pajama top was buttoned up the wrong way in his haste but there’s no time to correct that. Quickly he says love, love, love, for the hundredth time (but he’s visibly panicked at her rigid mask staring up at the ceiling) and promises again to phone her next morning. He flees with the laundry bag.

  Flames arise sluggish yellow, entwined with black smoke. Sparks shoot out, drift a little against the stars and go out. The fire, fueled by old newspapers, is for him in a distant lot. In the smoldering heart of it he sees the carbonized weave of the sheet. The discolored washrag, still wet, resists. The wind shifts and blows the acrid black smoke into his face. He coughs violently and starts vomiting.

  In the red gloom of the cellar he goes on vomiting. It has the sour taste of wine. When he finishes and is able to breathe he sees that the helmet’s unplugged. He’d forgotten to plug the helmet in.

  On the screen the badly faded vertical blur starts drifting toward the horizontal blur, also badly faded. He switches it off. He pulls the helmet off and expels everything from his mind except the necessity of leaving the cellar. Remembering recent cold and snow he struggles into his heavy overcoat.

  He wipes his mouth with the sleeve and stumbles up out of the cellar and out of the house into the hot blue glare of the vast concave screen overhead. It has tremendous blinding reality. He squints beyond the high green weeds and the hurricane fence at the other house. A dark-haired young woman is standing motionless at a window. On the lawn a red tricycle is half hidden by motionless rows of pink red, yellow tulips. Everything’s tremendously present. He tries to keep it all focused there. He sustains it for a few seconds. Then the dark-haired young woman raises her hand to her cheek, initiating process.

  The tulips move a little in the breeze. He thinks: they’ve come up very fast. He remembers the expert way the woman (not this one at the window) buried the bulbs a while ago but has trouble remembering her name. Then he realizes it was an earlier cycle. He’s already seen them pointing up, the violet-edged shoots, the stem bearing the sheathed flower and the slow revelation of bloom, pink, red, yellow like now, but another now because he’d seen them past this stage, yawning wider and wider each day, then the fall of the petals totally baring the pistils.

  He goes back into the house, mind in controlled blankness, a kind of delicate suspension. Sweating heavily, he removes the winter overcoat in the living room and goes on undressing.

  He leaves his clothing in a little pile and goes up naked into the bathroom. He brushes his teeth and then takes a hot shower, soaping himself over and over. He tries to shave. The light over the dirty mirror is dead. The razor’s dull. It leaves a pattern of white beard sprinklings and blood in the washbasin. He twists the faucet and the powerful cascade whirls it away. He carefully dresses with wrinkled but clean things.

  He soon soils them cleaning the house: vacuum cleaner, mop, pail, scrub-brush, old shirts ripped into rags. He concentrates on the job and maintains blankness and suspension. At the end he has to take another shower and even shaves again with more blood but much fewer bits of white beard in the washbasin this time. He takes it for rejuvenation.

  The phone goes on ringing for a long time. Finally she answers in a sleepy alarmed voice. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t understand why he dialed the number her son had left. He almost hangs up. She goes on saying: who is this? Is this Jack? Is that you Jack? That gives him a cue. He identifies himself in a casual tone of voice. After a long silence she says, “Wait.”

  He waits a few minutes. She comes back and asks in a less sleepy voice: why are you phoning at this time of night? It’s not unfriendly but you couldn’t say friendly either. He says he wouldn’t mind seeing her. Another long silence. Maybe, she says. One of these days. No, now, he says. He would like to see her now, she should come over right now or he’ll come over to her place right away. He’s drowning.

  She says after a while: it’s nearly three o’clock. In the morning, she adds heavily as though she’s not sure he knows day from night. Yes he does, he wants to assure her, she told him that. She’s got to keep it up.

  The last thing she says is that she can’t talk at th
ree in the morning. If he promises to behave like a human being this time and fix himself up maybe she’ll drop in tomorrow, but she’s not promising anything. If she does come it’ll be at about 3:30 pm of course. Just for a few minutes. She has a date. So maybe. But it’s no promise. She hangs up.

  How had he ever behaved if not like a human being? Hadn’t he always been a suffering human being, like everyone else, causing suffering and suffering for it? JW hangs up and goes to bed in hope of total and permanent reorientation the next day. But then his mind starts losing blankness and suspension. He imagines himself going down the cellar steps. He tries to capture her face to be able to concentrate on it the way he concentrated on the housecleaning. Finally he thinks he gets it.

  After a while he realizes that those parted lips and far-focused eyes are from the wrong album fifteen years before. It’s unreal like the Penny Black, Keith on the screen, Mr Anthony’s forgiving voice. Total and permanent reorientation seems to depend on capturing her later, real, face.

  It finally comes back. He falls asleep.

  When JW opens on her the next day at the promised time, he finds her face so radically deviated from that recent memory of it that he almost says: “God.” It’s like a betrayal. Simultaneously the middle-aged stranger widens her eyes at his face and practically says: “God.” Doesn’t actually say it but it’s all over her deviated face, no effort to politely conceal it as he had. Irritated but trying to smile, he says that yes he’s changed a little, but then so has she. She blinks at that.

  They stand like statues, each on the other side of the threshold. She crinkles her (suddenly familiar and unaged) nose in distaste. It can’t be at his immediate self, not with the third shower and clean clothes. He realizes now what must be keeping her on the outdoor side of the threshold. He aired out the house, all the rooms, but it’s persistent. Now she’s staring past his legs, at the heap of yellow powder in the vestibule, he feels sure. Irritated at that too, he remembers the dream where she’d said he had roaches on him. But he shouldn’t hold against her things said in a dream.

  He remembers his manners and opens the door wide, standing to one side for her to come in. “Watch your step,” he says, the roaches still on his mind. He points at the yellowish mound of powder. “Mounting a big campaign. They’ll be annihilated in no time.” She still doesn’t move from her side of the threshold. She says: “That’s old-fashioned, isn’t it? I thought they had disposable traps now. I wouldn’t know though, I never had roaches.” He tries to keep the conversation alive. He says: “Actually they’re not so bad. Poor press agent. Give a roach a bad name. Like anything else.” She searches. “Maybe so,” she concedes. He says, “Careful: I’m not saying I’m crazy about them.” “No,” she says.

  They stand there. “Come on in,” he says a little impatiently. She doesn’t move. She says, “Couldn’t we sit outside? It’s such a beautiful day.”

  He has to get two chairs. He kicks beer bottles aside, stamps down a patch of tall weeds and they sit down. The sunshine pains his eyes so he sits with his back to it. She sits facing it, unflattered, with her back to her former house. He feels drained. He knocked himself out cleaning up the house. All for nothing. If he had known she’d refuse to come in he’d have mowed the grass instead. At that thought he longs for the fresh new green smell and sees her nostalgically with her real face that first time, weeping from frustration at Hanna’s lawn mower. He remembers himself rescuing her like a kind of knight, mature but athletic.

  She breaks the silence by saying that you age in two years’ time at her age. He realizes that all along she’s been processing his opening remark about how she’d changed. Two years? he says. They haven’t seen each other in two years? That’s not possible. She says: not counting that time she came and rang and rang and he’d opened up with a thing on his head and pushed her away. Let’s not talk about that. I did that? She confirms it. Insults too. Bitch. I said that? She says: let’s not talk about it. JW excuses himself if it’s true and says that he hadn’t been well then. Oh, it’s true all right, she says. Let’s not talk about it. You said you wanted to see me. Well here I am. Yes, says JW. He thinks for a while and adds: great to see you.

  After a while she asks: did it have to be in the middle of the night? He thinks it over and says: I didn’t realize it was the middle of the night. That’s why I phoned you, I guess. She doesn’t look as if she understands what he means. She says:

  “I couldn’t believe it was actually you. I’d practically forgotten you. I washed my face to wake up. I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a dream. I once dreamed you phoned like that. That was a long time ago.”

  “I had a dream about you too. I think it was a dream. Did you bring me flowers once?”

  “I used to. Not just once.”

  “This was late at night. Very shopworn flowers.”

  “I never offered you or anyone else shopworn flowers in all my life. I was the one who should have gotten flowers. Fresh ones, fresh-cut roses for everything. I never got flowers in all my life. So I didn’t get any kind of flowers from you. Or anything else. I know what I got from you. Let’s not talk about that.”

  JW tries to tell her that he wrote three times to apologize and to explain.

  “I never got a letter. Maybe you dreamed that too. And you never answered the phone. Anyhow I don’t want apologies or flowers. I don’t want to talk about that, ever.”

  Silence. Bees buzz in the weeds surrounding them. A plane goes by.

  “Of course not,” JW mumbles.

  “Ever.”

  Longer silence. The sound of the plane starts fading away.

  “I can understand that.” JW mumbles it again.

  “Ever, ever, ever, ever.”

  JW says nothing. The bees go on and on.

  “Who wants to talk about the most terrible nervous breakdown in all my life? Martha nursed me for three months. I lost my job, of course. I’ve had three jobs since then. The last one was in the invoice department of an automobile part concern. I had to sell the house and move into a tiny two-room apartment. I just don’t want to talk about it. I’m trying to positivize. I tell myself it’s essentially unreal.”

  She shuts her eyes on him and dedicates her face to exclusive dialogue with the sun. Her face is sweating. After a while her blind hand undoes the two top buttons of her blouse. JW feels totally excluded. He wants to offer reparation, some great present. What present? He can’t think of anything. Eyes still closed, she undoes a third button.

  In the continuing silence JW briefly wonders if he shouldn’t invite her, in this heat, to go on with the buttons and discard her upper garments and sunbathe with her hands clasped behind her neck as in the old days. The tall weeds shield them from view. But he doesn’t ask. Like himself she’s taken great strides toward desiccation. He realizes he’s basically indifferent to breasts now as to music and money. It sounds like a process of spiritual purification, a divestiture of secondary things. What’s the primary thing though? The silence goes on. He dozes off.

  When he wakes up her chair’s empty. The sun has shifted westward. JW feels sorry he didn’t ask her to partially disrobe for him. It might have boosted her morale to be able to turn down that request with indignation. In his concern for her morale he discovers, despite the betrayal of her face, a certain residual tenderness for her. He thought he’d lost that too. The sunshine hurts his eyes.

  He goes inside and finds her sitting deep in the striped armchair with closed eyes and parted lips. They have trouble synchronizing their periods of consciousness. But is she really asleep? Isn’t it the cult stunt, hoping he’ll vanish? Or pretence at sleep to be able to account for the hour she’s been in the house all by herself? Doing what? He thinks of Hanna stealing down the cellar steps with the sledgehammer. Did he lock the door?

  She opens her eyes. She doesn’t retreat back behind the lids at the sight of him. She looks around. He’s aware now of what a lousy housecleaning job he’s done: dust everyw
here. “I thought you left,” he says. “Not without saying goodbye. I didn’t want to wake you up. I wasn’t feeling too well. Too much sun maybe. I’ll be going in a minute.”

  She looks at the hi-fi components piled on the table. “I told Ricky to bring it back. I said I wouldn’t speak to him unless he did that. That was a year ago. You haven’t even set it up.” A year ago? He explains that he doesn’t listen to music any more. She takes that almost like another insult. “You have to listen to music. You were always talking about music and your audio system.”

  Suddenly he has an idea so wonderful that he stammers saying it. “I don’t need it anymore. It’s just gathering dust. Listen, it’s yours. It’s a present. You can have it. Right now. The CDs too. Everything. Go get your car and we’ll load it.” She says she doesn’t want it. He insists. She refuses passionately.

  They start quarreling over it. He remembers Harvey’s strip of garden and the house on the beach. He thinks: she never wants any of my presents. “Never got anything from you,” she said. Whose fault? Refusing this is a refusal of him, humiliation, desertion, a sentencing to permanent disorientation. She’ll get this present whether she wants it or not.

  He embraces one of the dusty speakers, staggers with impeded vision out of the house to the gate and out onto the sidewalk. She’s parked her car a long way off. Every few seconds he has to crane his neck to get his nose over the top of the speaker for a quick glance at possible obstacles. Tricycling kid. Ash-can to the left, street-lamp to the right, stop zigzagging.

  Now his visitor, barring the way. “Put that down, you’re killing yourself. I told you I don’t want it.” He pants out: “You reject all my presents, everything I offer you. It’s not true nobody ever offered you flowers. I did. You prepared them for me but I paid for them, forty dollars, and they were for you.” “They were for Hanna’s birthday.” They argue over that.

  He ends by panting out, “This goddam audio system belongs to you now. I’m going to give you five thousand dollars, too. Money doesn’t mean anything to me anymore either.” “I don’t want five thousand dollars.” “Ten thousand then. It’s all I have. How much more do you want?”

  She gets into the car and drives away, leaving him in pain in the middle of the sidewalk embracing his teak speaker. He’s strained his heart badly. He eases the speaker down on the sidewalk, upends it and sits down on it, panting. Waiting for the chest pain to let up he watches her beat-up Chevy turn the corner and disappear. The tricycled three-year-old contemplates him huge-eyed. His mother snatches him out of danger. A well-dressed business type skirts him like dog shit, looking intensely ahead.

  After a while he hears a car pulling up alongside him. The door slams. “Stop this craziness, Jerry. I think you do it on purpose to scare me off. Stop it. Get up and give me a hand with it.” Well, that was all he wanted in the first place. She’s yielded, so he helps her load the car with that heavy fraction of her present. She drives them back, gets out and opens the barbed-wired gate with the warning signs mitigated by bindweed bells and drives in. Instead of asking him to get the other speaker and the components she orders him to help her unload. He doesn’t move. She starts struggling with the speaker on the back seat, cries out in exasperation: “You stop this craziness!” She commands him to give her a hand.

  When they place the speaker back in a corner next to the sensor she commands him to place the second speaker in the other corner, then to set it up. “I don’t listen to it anymore,” he says, collapsing in the striped armchair. “Tell me how to set it up.” He gives her the instructions. She goes over to the cases with the CDs. “OK, what’s your favorite?” “No favorite.” “Beethoven? Bach? “I think you’ll find Bach is nice as I remember.” “Bach … Bach … O.K., what Bach?” “You’ll find the B Minor is nice, I think.” “B Minor what?” “The Mass, naturally.” “Haven’t you got something more cheerful?” “It’s extremely cheerful, I seem to remember.” She starts it.

  When she turns around to him his hands are hermetically pressing his ears. He makes out her lips forming “What are you doing?” and hears his voice imprisoned deep within him: “It’s yours, I don’t want any of it.” She leaves the room. He frees his ears and beneath trumpets hears her car starting and then driving away. He waits a while. When she doesn’t return he gets up and turns off the Kyrie Eleison. The sudden silence is deafening.

  He goes to the cellar door. It’s all right. He locked it. Coming back into the living room something tickles his neck. He jerks violently. He thinks it’s a roach. It’s just his long hair. One of these days he’ll have to have his hair cut. He decides to go out for a walk. He has to buy eight electric light bulbs, razor blades, furniture-polish and salt anyhow. The sunshine’s much weaker now. It doesn’t hurt his eyes.

  When he returns, he puts the salt in the cupboard, the razor blades in the medicine chest and replaces the burned-out bulb above the mirror. He replaces the burned-out bulbs in the other rooms. He goes back to housecleaning. Dusting and polishing the furniture, his mind is a perfect blank again. He can’t find the Swiss electrostatic-nullifying feather-brush. He sacrifices four handkerchiefs and a woolen scarf for the job.

  After he finishes, he switches the machine back on. With the vacuum cleaner he has to raise the volume. When he finishes with what can be done to the living room he removes the Scherchen B Minor, puts on the superior Harnoncourt 1969 version and sinks into the flowered armchair. After it’s over he looks at his watch. One thirty-six. He adds, “A.M.” out loud. He removes the CDs, places them in their jackets, puts them back in alphabetical order and goes to bed.

  For the second night in succession, sleepless, he tries to capture her real face two years before and concentrate on it to the exclusion of anything else. But all he can get is the new altered one. It’s not as effective but it doesn’t shock him so much now. She salvaged her eyes, ears and nose after all and probably other things as well. His fingers recall her vertebras.

  At 3:00 am he’s ready to apologize for his behavior and tell her that he’s decided to keep the audio system and use it too. She’d been so passionate about it that it seems to him to be the greatest of presents for her, replacing Harvey’s garden and the house on the beach. Then he thinks of another present so tremendous for him that he weeps at it. He goes downstairs and picks up the phone. At the last moment he remembers the time (of night) and hangs up. He’s hesitating between his bed and the cellar door when the phone rings.

  In a fast breathless voice he can hardly understand she says she can’t sleep and apologizes for waking him, apologizes for her behavior that afternoon, denounces herself in detail, finds no mitigating circumstances. They’d behaved like strangers, talking about roaches of all things. She’d gone back to old things best left unsaid. It was grave spiritual backsliding on her part, getting mired down in the ephemeral. Could she come again tomorrow? She’d been so … ungracious. Of course, of course, she’d accept his marvelous present, his hi-fi.

  When he opens on her he finds her transformed for the second time, even further from what he still takes to be her real face. She has wet-looking pink lipstick, blue lids, gold dust at the base of her throat. Chemical blondness has got the upper hand over the gray and the surviving natural blondness. She’s covered with rings and bracelets and pendants. They generate some kind of field-force of illuminated certitude in her face. The scoop neck of her gay embroidered peasant blouse reveals collarbones urgent against tired skin. Her eyes and ears and nose remain faithful though.

  He praises her appearance this time. Had my hair fixed up she says. See you had a haircut too. Not nearly as gray either. Why shouldn’t we? He invites her in again. She still wants to sit in the garden. He speaks of something very important he wants to show her. She steps inside the living room like a blind and deaf woman and sits down on the very edge of the striped armchair. She starts chatting, with great poise, about the weather and then about her son.

  It’s incredible but she hasn??
?t noticed the new things in the room. There’s The Four Seasons, for her of course, mercifully low but perfectly audible, the third cleaning job, the new carpet, the painstaking gilding job on the wooden roses of the oval mirror, what’s piled up against a wall, above all what’s on the table. It’s true she’s sitting with her back to it. She’s still talking about her son (“He’s saved, thank God. He’s out of drugs. He’s changed so completely that sometimes I think he’s somebody else.”)

  When she stops for breath he makes an inviting gesture toward the table with the new linen tablecloth, the bamboo place-mats, her favorite port, cut-glass dishes with radishes, toothpicked cheese-cubes, black and green olives, celery, also the gigantic bouquet, also the neat stack of papers, the two pens and the fat worn Treasury of Great Poems edited by Untermeyer. “Oh, thank you.” She chooses a branch of celery, rapidly inspects it and nibbles symbolically. He starts filling the new cut-crystal wineglass.

  “Oh not for me, thank you.” She explains that she doesn’t drink any more. She doesn’t need it any more. Pills either. When he has to point at the flowers, she says, “Oh lovely, just lovely.” Trying to control his irritation, he says, “Goes well with Vivaldi, don’t you think? That’s The Four Seasons. Spring. You know, flowers.” “Oh yes, I love Vivaldi.” “I remembered that. We heard it once in the supermarket. That’s why I bought you the CD.” She returns to her son.

  In another of her gasps for breath he points to what’s piled up against the wall: the five-gallon cans of paint, the rollers and paint brushes, trays, sponges, pails, the pile of soft new rags, etc.

  “Oh yes,” she says. “You won’t be able to rent the house without fixing it up.”

  “Rent? Did you actually imagine I was going to make you pay rent to live here?”

  Her face goes blank at that. Then she laughs incredulously.

  “Oh gosh, Jerry, I haven’t come to move in with you. Of all ideas. I’ve come to convince you to move out, of course. You have to leave this horrible place. Otherwise I’ll never see you again, Jerry, ever, I swear I won’t.”

  “Move out? Where? With you?”

  “You know I’m married. You’ll find something, a two-room flat like mine. We could see each other very often.”

  He sits there in deep silence. Finally he says sullenly that he’d already lived in a two-room flat with big purple flowers everywhere for two years. The landlady was nice though. Suddenly nostalgic, he tries to recall Mrs Philip’s face. He can’t.

  He stares at the $265 worth of painting stuff and tries to convince her of the terrific advantages to moving in here with him in a completely renovated house. The savings on rent for her. Space. He points at Untermeyer. They could have talking-sessions every day. Now he remembers her big thing. He points at the brand-new spade and rake, expensive Swedish steel, leaning against the wall. They’ll turn the jungle into a Garden of Eden, he says. Roses and lilies everywhere. She must miss her garden. She says, oh, she still gardens, small-scale, raises miniature plants in big corked bottles with cute tiny tools. It’s an art, a real challenge.

  He’s depressed at the way everything’s shrunk for her. Then he has an inspiration. She’ll have to see. He goes over and pries open the lid of one of the pails of paint with the screwdriver. She asks in an alarmed voice what he’s doing.

  “Just a sample,” he says, dipping the widest brush in the white paint and starting in on the wall, flip-fluck, flip-fluck.

  “Just the first coat but it’ll give you an idea. You won’t recognize the place. Listen, we could begin right now, both of us. You could take that blouse off and put on one of my shirts. There must be a cap somewhere, Huck.”

  “Stop that,” she says over and over.

  He explains: “I don’t want to impose my own tastes on you. We can tint it any color you like. Blue. Pink, even. Anything you like, Beth.” Flip-fluck. Flip-fluck.

  “I’m leaving if you don’t stop immediately,” she says.

  He stops immediately. It looks lousy anyhow. He’d forgotten to stir the paint. And of course the walls have to be washed rinsed and prepared. The soiled white crisscrosses look a little like a cryptic Chinese ideogram. Otherwise crazy.

  “You’ve got paint all over you.” She looks around for something to remove the stains and sees a pile of papers on a chair. When she sees what they are (each time he comes Ricky plants them all over the living room) she forgets his stains, sits down in front of him, gazes up at him and says:

  “I’m trying so hard to believe. We have to believe. That’s your problem too, Jerry, you have to believe. If you did we’d be together again, one great family and you part of it too. We’d be spiritually wedded, Jerry. Wouldn’t you like that?” She reaches out and touches his hand.

  JW finds himself kneeling before her, gripping her bare arms, his face in her lap, almost in shameful territory, and stammering muffled and desperately, “Yes, I want to marry you.”

  She displaces his head a little, strokes it and says, “A spiritual marriage, of course.”

  “Oh, any kind of marriage, Beth. Beggars can’t be choosers. As long as it’s with you.”

  “Come on, Jerry. Let’s get out of this place. Right away. I have to see my dentist anyhow. Where do you want to go after the dentist? Any place special?”

  “I’d like to go to the beach with you.”

  Her unaged blue eyes widen. “That’s uncanny. And you say you don’t believe in thought transmission. A beach was just what I was going to suggest but for tomorrow. Have you ever been to Coney Island?”

  Why Coney Island? he asks suspiciously. Why not? she asks. I’ve never been there. He says: I was thinking of a real beach, not so crowded. Oh but we could do that too, the next day. After Coney Island (unless something happens, she says mysteriously) we’ll drive back to my flat. There’s a sofa in the living room. Then (unless something happens) they’ll go to any beach he likes. “It’ll be a beach weekend. Wouldn’t you like that?” He doesn’t answer.

  “So you’ll come with me tomorrow to Coney Island?” Her haggard painted face is alight, loses a year or so with it. He doesn’t deprive her of that, doesn’t say no even if he doesn’t say yes. “Oh, my sweetheart, you’re coming!” So he has to say yes.

  She gets up and brings back her bag and sits down again. Very solemnly she whispers: “Stand up, Jerry.” She remains seated, rummaging in the bag on her lap. A lock of new pure blonde hair swings before her eyes. She comes up with a little jewel-box like the one she kept the Valium in except there’s no simpering shepherdess and swain on the lid. There’s a multitude of stars on it. She chooses something, stands up and tosses the bright lock out of her eyes. The movement reveals she’s salvaged a little of her throat too. “Now give me the finger of your left hand, Jerry. Not the pinky, for heaven’s sake. I don’t want to bet with you. Your ring-finger, of course.”

  She slips a ring loosely on his ring finger. It looks like a gold ring but hasn’t got the weight of gold. It’s set with a great big red stone, a fortune if it had been a ruby or even semi-precious. “It doesn’t fit. You’re so thin. You used to be so big. I’ll fatten you up though. Wait, I’ve got another one.” She rummages again and comes up with an identical ring: underweight imposter gold again, set, this one, with a great big green stone. “It’s a perfect fit, Jerry. You promise you’ll never remove it? Whatever happens?”

  She chooses another ring from the case and hands it to him. “Now you slip this one on my finger.” Most of her fingers are occupied by similar-looking rings. She points at her ring finger. There’s her diamond wedding ring and above that a copy of the first ring she tried out on him. He slips the green one above the red one. It produces a traffic-light effect. “My sweetheart, we’re spiritually wedded now.”

  JW puts his hand in his pocket for a handkerchief for his eyes and nose. “You don’t have to pay for the rings now,” she says. He doesn’t dare pull the handkerchief out. He’s not sure of the next move, now that they’re w
edded. For old time’s sake he touches her left breast. She lets him do that but says something about celibacy. “Anyhow, we’re too old for that,” she adds, but without pulling her breast back. They stand in that posture for a while like statuary. Finally JW withdraws his hand, takes out the handkerchief and wipes his eyes and blows his nose.

  She takes him in charge, totally. What a relief that is. She maps out their immediate future. After he packs urgent things he’ll accompany her to the dentist’s and wait maybe an hour. Then this evening a restaurant and then he can sleep on her living room sofa. Then tomorrow Coney Island. Then if there’s a next day they’ll drive out to any other beach he liked. Why not that beach they’d already gone to that cold rainy March weekend two years ago? Then on Monday job-hunting for her and apartment-hunting for him. Okay, my darling? He nods. Everything goes very fast then. She unearths two valises and a flight bag and supervises packing.

  On the threshold of the house he tells her the telluric wave machine has to be shut off, definitively. It may take a few hours. She should go by herself to the dentist’s. When she comes back they’ll leave as planned. She agrees reluctantly and drives off.

  I go down the cellar steps for the last time, I know, either way. I turn on the red lamps, like a muted fire. I go over to the console and sit down. The cassette is still there with its fading contents. In real travel it must be different. My hands are autonomous. They crown me with the helmet, set at 1: 9999. It’s plugged in now. The image swims up: the vertical blur motionless and then moving slowly toward the horizontal blur.

  On the threshold of entry for I don’t know how long my finger is rigid on the red button. Twenty years gazing at her from the threshold of her room or clasping her, time halted. But what if old time, programmed, can’t be halted and we have to endure what followed for twenty years? Or faulty navigation and then fire for twenty years?

  It’s bitterly dank down here. Quench my thirst O Lord. More. Aren’t those rats stirring about? The rim of the metal cap bites into my forehead. More. In the faint reflection of the screen I look like an old madman condemned to death. Isn’t it unconstitutional, cruel and unusual punishment, to condemn an old man to the electric chair? No, now the thing on my head looks more like a dunce cap than anything else. I should have torn up his check that day. I’d be 2000 miles from this place in my nice warm bed right now. Probably having nightmares, that’s true, but at least ones I could wake up out of. I can’t help going back in my own private built-in time machine (far more efficient than his) to the day I got fatally involved. That was how long ago? I can’t remember. What did I want to remember? I can’t remember.

  Somebody’s poking around upstairs. The woman’s back. The neighbor across the way. My memory’s going too, fading like the girl, what’s her name? She’s calling my name now (the woman), so she knows me better than I know her. The button feels smooth beneath my index finger. I can hear the woman calling my name louder. She must be just on the other side of the locked door. What’s her name? Now she’s turning the cellar doorknob. Opening the door. How is it I forgot to triple-bolt it? “Jerry?” she says a couple of times. That’s my name. Now silence. Maybe she’s gone, whoever she is.

  “Jerry, come on up out of there,” she’s just said.

  Suddenly a name comes back to me.

  Beth. Beth Something.

  Somehow, I can’t remember how, she has to do with tulips.

  “Jerry, come on up out of there,” she’s just said again.

  Beth Anderson.

  Yes, I remember now. If I don’t push the button (What for? Something desirable but fearful, is all I know) we’ll be leaving this house and be going to the seaside as I always wanted.

  That’s tomorrow.

  Suddenly I see them as they’ll be tomorrow: massed on the beach prone and gleaming, waving, shouting, wrestling, burrowing, raising structures of sand, flying kites, leaping to volley-balls. I can smell tomorrow’s suntan lotion, hot-dogs and waffles, something of the sea way beyond. Now I see tomorrow’s Ferris Wheel and the Loop-the-Loop and the shrieking roller coaster, the crowded boardwalk, hot-dogs with chili and mustard, ice-cream cones, popcorn, the mica-flashes of trillions of grains of sand of nowness.

  But wait: those one-piece bathing suits, those concealed belly buttons, those rubber bathing caps, that cotton-candy cloud and lemon lollipop sun in the momma-eyed sky: this is Coney Island in the 1930’s so not now and to come, so a fraud, the terrible late discovery.

  Who can save us?

  O I see them now in solemn procession across those sands: bearded to the eyes under their broadbrimmed black hats and now turning unanimous toward the multitude of time-trapped unbelievers. One of us suddenly falls to his knees in the firm sand, stricken with enlightenment, and isn’t it possible? After all that time at last the ultimate conversion, number one billion, three hundred thousand four hundred and twenty three? He-I the Elect, freed from his doomed moment of triviality? And yes with the burning focus of his yearning and belief, critical mass attained, all in-gathered, the balance-tipping, the end of now and then and to come: the beach, the sea, the sky, that painted theatrical veil lifting, and time vanquished for all time and we’re together again, all of us, the dead and the living, all with pardoning smiles.

  The End

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