Seven
You thought of a small child or a moron let loose in that long-ago room with an old defective 8-millimeter movie-camera running sporadically at the wrong speed with the wrong lens and focus. Sometimes in the course of that night and also much later I thought they actually were old film sequences he was trying to palm off as stuff his machine was pulling out of the thin air of time. Convincing another of the authenticity of the images allowed him to convince himself, I reasoned. Madness works that way, I’d read somewhere.
In those moments I extended my disbelief to the radio voices of the earlier night too. I downgraded them to old recordings. But then I’d remember the horror of random temporal selection. Could he have faked that? I suppose he could have. I’d let myself swing back into belief anyhow.
What bothered me sometimes was the rapidity with which my disbelief crumbled. It was as though I wanted to believe in the invisible persistence of time past as badly as he did. Didn’t that make it something like shared insanity? At this thought I’d swing back fearfully into disbelief.
In the dominant periods of belief, you were tempted to attribute malevolence to the machine behind the lead-plated wall. Childish anthropomorphizing. Simply, its mode of operation was alien to our perception of spatial and temporal reality. When it didn’t zoom into senseless close-ups it saw the living room fish-eyed at an angle of 180 degrees. Everything was shrunken and suffered distortion, radically at the edges.
And once your eyes compensated for all those bent lines and crazy perspectives and you were about to try to recognize tiny lost people, the image started fading. Fading away from already faded into nothing at all. Depending upon how far back the machine had gone the image lasted between one and forty seconds. After a while you learned to judge the duration pretty accurately from the start by the quality of the image. The more flickering and feeble it was, the older it was and that much more short-lived, stillborn almost. Could he have faked that?
Another troubling thing about the machine’s performance was what Harvey called “random spatial selectivity.” The human eye/brain couple privileges the human in a landscape. It knows how to subordinate the non-essential. Harvey’s machine subordinated nothing. Anything occupying space was treated as a legitimate subject.
I remember that first revelation of the machine’s pitiful capabilities. It turned out at the end of the sequence that Harvey’s mother had been there in the living room all the while, seated in a flowered armchair probably looking at a (TV) screen herself.
What the machine gave in quick succession was, I remember, the speckled pattern of the carpet renovated by the return to the pre-Hanna years, the fold of a curtain, a dragon’s head on a Chinese vase, a big oval mirror pivoted to a wooden stand, ceiling-cornices, the fluted leg of a chair (I must stop) an electrical outlet, certain keys of a piano I mustn’t enumerate, the cross of window-panes, a dish of fruit on the table: three mottled bananas, four apples, two oranges, a bunch of grapes, how many grapes?
I could say but have to stop. What did I want to say before those objects almost overpowered me? I think I wanted to say that Harvey’s machine detailed the living (once living) and the inanimate with impartiality. We got Harvey’s mother, and badly fragmented at that, only in the last second before the sequence faded. She was fragmented because Harvey’s machine decomposed things and people (in a sense things alone since people were things to it) in accordance to some strange logic.
It didn’t recognize the human face as a unit. It didn’t even recognize the mouth as a unit. You’d get the lower lip, the chin, the neck, part of the chest. That’s the fragment we got of Harvey’s mother in the sequence I dangerously described. It was just as well we didn’t get the eyes.
Sometimes the dictatorship of objects was worse than that. You could be involved for hours with senseless things before you got a fragment of a face, lost again after a second or so. And you could be reasonably sure it was lost for good unless you had a life span of a few hundred thousand years. That’s another aspect of the machine’s mode of operation. I’ll try to return to it if I remember and if I don’t get bogged down in things as I almost did there again for the fourth time, I think: first the junk-heap, then the Polack shantytown, then Rachel at Ebbet’s Field, now this.
They are time-traps and they open up under your feet when you least expect them to.
The thing is to react immediately, flounder out of it at once, not let yourself get sucked under.
Sometimes movement in the living room would distract the machine from its minute investigation of trivialities. It would zoom in on the movement and then step back and track it. It wasn’t the intrinsic importance of the person as a person or the importance of what he was doing that motivated the machine’s choice as I assumed at first. Movement in that room was generally human but a sudden billowing of a summer curtain would polarize the machine’s attention in the same way.
Once we saw the Morgensterns tiny and distorted, fish-visioned, seated at the dinner table. Somebody unknown to me tossed an orange across the wavy table to Harvey. The lenses zoomed in on that orange, pitted like a Martian moon, held it in suspension, time frozen, for two seconds and then zoomed in on a fragment of the anonymous arm that had thrown it.
In addition to random spatial selection there was random temporal selection. It could be terrifying.
One sequence I would like to forget started with what must have been a Christmas dinner in fish-eye view with maybe fifteen people gathered at the Morgenstern table. Before we could pick out the participants, we got the usual zooming inspections of the clawed feet of the sofa, the frame of the oval mirror and its carved rosebuds, a curtain-tassel and other trivia. Then came a series of close-ups on the Christmas tree. Five seconds for tinsel. Then a macro close-up of a glass ball in which we could see the dinner table in even worse distortion than usual. It wasn’t like an arty film playing around with mirrored views of the essential. The people about the table just happened to be there reflected in the convex surface. The machine went from glass ball to glass ball with maniac devotion.
Once Mrs Morgenstern with the jet-black hair of her mid-forties was tracked in jerky movement, bearing a platter with a turkey. Then the machine returned to its glass-ball monomania. We were surprised at the length of the sequence. It wasn’t the habitual maximum of forty seconds but three full minutes.
Once again, movement interrupted the glass ball investigation and the machine focused on Mrs Morgenstern bearing in a platter of fruit.
She had shrunk. Her hair was pure white.
I have to believe that the machine had plunged vertically, diachronically, detailing a long succession of Christmas trees, spanning a quarter of a century in those three minutes. Harvey deduced that later.
At the moment his suddenly white-haired mother appeared on the screen he was incapable of analysis. The image wrenched from him another “Momma!” This one came unusually loud and cavernous, as from his bowels, bypassing his stricken vocal cords.
What swam up on the screen that night couldn’t have been trickery. It had to be authentic, time past dredged up moldering in distortion and fragmentation. He couldn’t have contrived that suffering on himself: not just the telescoping of time but the way the supposedly resurrected people looked: that paper whiteness of their faces, those circles of blackness in the place of eyes, the wild jerking way they moved. They looked dead.