Time Travail

  ***

  Eight

  When I came up from the cellar with burning eyes and collapsed on the bed that night (the night of December 22: the living room windows in the neighborhood had been showing radiant tinseled trees for a week), I discovered they’d come up with me. They went on jerking about eyeless. It was no good closing my eyes on them as I’d tried to do below in the cellar until Harvey, misunderstanding, told me to wake up and go on viewing.

  They were on the inner screen now. My brain wouldn’t take orders to display other things. Involvement with the things of the room didn’t work either. The animated dead surcharged the walls, the ceiling, the furniture. I tried to convince myself it was image retention. I remembered the phenomenon as a kid after a day of fishing or berry picking. But what persisted now wasn’t a bobber or magnified blackberries.

  At one point my brain suddenly went beyond passive replay. It started processing the images. Improved them into color and focus. Straightened out the bent perspectives. Interrelated those macro-shots. Now I saw every detail of a living room that meant nothing to me and that I’d visited for two days thirty years before.

  I saw Mrs Morgenstern too in her great kindness, her hazel eyes freed from the blobs of blackness, the gray streaks in her dark hair, the mole on her left cheek. I heard her voice urging another slice of strawberry shortcake on me. It was as though it had all happened minutes before. It lasted about five seconds.

  Five seconds of joy. Why joy? For her sake, the reversal of process, seeing her the way she’d really been? Or selfishly for my sake? For the way I’d been, seeing it all thirty years before? Then it collapsed. I lost the room and the cake and the real her and my earlier self. I was back again to those distorted perspectives and the jerking once-people with stark eyeless faces.

  They were like silent-film actors with crude charcoal and chalk makeup, I thought, now in bed, trying to reduce them to make-believe. I thought of early Weimar expressionist films, Nosferatu the Vampire and the lunatics of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari seen in the Museum of Modern Art in the forties with a bare-armed silk-bloused girl whose face and name I tried to recall. I escaped them that way until suddenly the museum lines deformed and the girl jerked towards me eyeless and I recognized her and woke up.

  The next morning they were gone. But I had to go down to them the next night for even longer.

  It started up again when I returned to my room. There was the joy of resurrection and rejuvenation again. But the price was too high for five seconds.

  I practiced self-medication. For a while they paled at Handel. If I stared hard enough at the Van Gogh posters, almost projected myself into the seascape and the boat stranded on the beach, sometimes they let up inside for a while.

  The fourth day an ophthalmologist tortured the back of my eyes with white-blue dazzle in search of what caused the colored patterns I’d complained of. He found nothing. Maybe the problem was further upstream, I suggested in great fear. He didn’t see the necessity for a brain scan and advised against abuse of TV and computer screens. I got him to commit his advice to paper and showed it to Harvey who reluctantly reduced what he called “viewing” – I called it “ghouling” – to six hours a day. He needed my vision as a control, supposedly.

  So the wee-hour vault chore went on. I closed my eyes when I could and busied my mind with salary-figures. I wondered if the clean break with Forest Hill couldn’t be managed in three months’ time.

  Only Harvey stepped across the threshold of the living room now. He had it all to himself. Had them all to himself. Hanna couldn’t stand the sudden whirring and crossfire of the four lenses. Not that she knew what the sensors were there for. Harvey didn’t confide in her any more than he did in the kitchen-table. She must have sensed something uncanny about them anyhow. She had the TV installed up in her bedroom where it used to wake me with its nearby booming at 10:00 am.

  But I knew what the sensors were there for if she didn’t. I left the living room (I began thinking of it as the dead room) to its earlier inhabitants, the co-dwellers. I’d seen them there on his screen. So they were there in the dead room and forever. They were impotent but invincible. The earth could explode but they’d go on occupying that space, forever.

  Not just that space. Soon I sensed them contaminating the other rooms of the house. I tried to combat the idea that in whatever room I went I shouldered invisible multitudes, that there wasn’t a square inch of unoccupied space, that with every step I was increasing their number, depositing hundreds of moments of myself behind me as on a stroboscopic photo. It was suffocating. When you thought of it, as you couldn’t help doing more and more often, you wished you could dwell on the ceiling like a fly. But then you realized that the ceiling itself must be virtually black with untold generations of flies. Illogically (hadn’t they been unbearably peopled too?) I longed for empty beaches sloping into the immensity of the sea. Again the Van Gogh posters helped a little.

  By this time (the second week of ghouling) an incident occurred that I interpreted as a possible explanation for what was happening to me. The incident was connected with Harvey’s pathological secrecy. He’d said over and over that I should never go down in the cellar when he wasn’t there. He hid his calculations from me, flatteringly, as though I could make sense of the symbols and figures.

  That day I went down the stairs and surprised him coming out of the lead-plated room where the master machine was. He’d switched the light off inside. All I could dimly see behind him in the upright rectangle of blackness was the end of a shelf and on it a notebook.

  He caught my curious gaze. Snapping the big brass combination lock shut and scrambling the code, he said:

  “I wouldn’t advise poking around. Inside here. Unless you want to get. What I got. That’s why there’s lead. On the wall and the door. I found out about the machine. Too late. Like Curie. Unlucky Pierre.”

  I wondered at first if it wasn’t an invention of his to scare me away from what lay behind that gray door. Then I wondered if it mightn’t be true.

  Maybe I’d been exposed to radiation myself despite the lead armor. I imagined the time-rays seeping past the lead-molecules. It was a frightening thought. Less so, though, than incipient insanity. Unless the two explanations weren’t mutually exclusive.

  There was a fundamental question I evaded then. At the first symptoms of the sickness and assuming the machine down in the cellar was the source of it why didn’t I pack up and flee, never mind all the money he owed me? Flee the dust and disorder, outer and inner, the croaking voice, the roaches, those shadows waylaying you at every turn of the corridors?

  Maybe it was because for the moment those symptoms were limited to the space of the house. As soon as I stepped outside into the suburban banality of manicured lawns and backyard barbecues the symptoms weakened. I felt almost normal a mile from the house, jogging. I tried to reason that it couldn’t be in my blood or brain. Infection and craziness you transport with you wherever you go.

  That was the superficial reason I stayed on. I think I know the deep reason now.

  But most of the time I was inside the house. I started developing strange ideas. One day Hanna tripped over my pail of warm sudsy water in the corridor outside the dead room. She upset it but stubbed her toe, a consolation. She hopped furiously on one foot holding the other. She swore at me. I swore back because of the mess. I told her that it was her job anyhow not mine. I was on my hands and knees with the scrubbing-brush.

  I told her I couldn’t stand the filth anymore but it wasn’t that. I’d got the idea that the dust and cobwebs were a favorable milieu for them like dankness for toadstools. It didn’t change things but I felt better while I was doing it until I imagined Mrs Morgenstern eyeless in her red bandanna alongside me scrubbing away too.

  Powerfully imagined her and the others in those rooms and passages. But no more than that, I tried to reassure myself. I didn’t actually see them off the screen, in the contemporary living room. I
hadn’t reached Harvey’s stage yet. When he wasn’t down in the cellar you were sure to find him in that whirring room Hanna and I steered clear of. It was as though he wanted to inhabit the same space as his mother. You could understand his fixation on the past. There wasn’t much for him in the present or in the future which he said didn’t exist.

  I guess there was nothing for him in sanity either. I’d stand on the threshold I didn’t dare cross and watch Harvey in that room. I noted how he made skirting movements in the middle of carpeted emptiness and realized that he was avoiding the long-vanished piano. Or he would bump into furniture that was occupying former emptiness. Sometimes he’d talk to the ghosts. In his mind they must have replied because once I heard him wheezing with laughter.

  Finally Hanna would venture to the threshold of that room, not scared, like me, of the ghosts she didn’t suspect, but scared of the ceaseless glass eyes. She’d see what he was doing and say: “Harv! Cut it out. You come on out back here.” Repeated it over and over. Usually if she nagged him long enough he’d painfully come out of it.

  Once he put up as fierce a struggle as down in the cellar. It was time for his hospital treatment. He ignored her and went on with his half-smiling dialogue. Finally she glanced in fear at the sensors and entered the dead room heroically. She grabbed him by the arm. He looked away from his interlocutor, squinted at her for a second and then returned to the interlocutor with a word maybe of apology for the dim interruption. He tried to recover his arm gripped in her ham.

  “You touch me. You bitch and. Jerry gets half of. Schering Plough.”

  “Stick all of Schering Plough up your ass.” She dragged him toward the sad, sane side of the threshold.

  “I don’t want any of it,” I said in a loud intractable voice to overrule my secret reaction to his words. He’d recalled the promise of the eventual 25% of all of the shares and the bonds and the money-market fund, a promise he’d made in the middle of the night of the old voices. Ever since, without really believing in it, I hadn’t been able to avoid thinking of that $200,000 after taxes, shamefully each time (because of what it necessarily involved), but quite often.

  Maybe that was why I put up with as much as I did. Everything except, finally, the ghouling sessions when one day he said that he was hoping to bring back my mother, a frequent visitor to that living room.

  I told him I didn’t want him ever to do that. He shouldn’t ever disturb my mother. I told him I wasn’t going down in the cellar any more, never again. I’d decided not to ghoul anymore.

  My term for it offended him. That sidetracked the issue. I reminded him what they looked like. He yelled at me faintly. How could they look dead when in fact they were alive? I should have my eyes examined. I didn’t tell him I already had. Apparently we didn’t see the same things on the screen. Maybe rectification of the deformed images was instantaneous and permanent with him, not just five seconds. Didn’t that mean instantaneous and persistent joy? He conceded a certain distortion and flicker but claimed you could see their eyes.

  I stuck by my refusal. Finally we compromised. I would be released from viewing but had to take my memory-boosting duties seriously. I should do it in writing.

  Two weeks after the first mutilated images swam up on his screen Harvey handed me questionnaires on people I’d known in the old burned-down house. He expected me to recall scenes involving them and to situate them roughly in time and space. “Navigational assistance” he called it again.

  There were a couple of blank pages to be filled out on classmates, on his grandparents, on my mother. There were about twenty blank pages to be filled out on his own mother. Just a page for his father. He’d never liked his father.

  There were four questions on Rachel Rosen. First, he wanted a detailed physical description if I still refused to let him have a photo of her. Second, a detailed account of our various encounters, in particular the first and last encounters, with the exact time and date and place. Third, a detailed description of her room with the estimated location of the room with regard to the later Anderson house. The fourth question encompassed the three others. I was to describe in detail anything else I remembered concerning the subject.

  All that paper allotted to Rachel Rosen – there must have been five hundred sheets in all – seemed to dictate an in-depth treatment. Those blank sheets were like histological sections of the memory-blasted parts of his brain. I was supposed to inscribe things on them. I felt like scribbling after each question, “I can’t remember.” But those three words would have created a terrific imbalance with the five hundred starved expectant sheets. He’d be sure to take it for deliberate withholding. Wouldn’t that mean midnight descent to the cellar and resumption of ghouling? Resumption of exposure to infection? I sat at my desk and stared down at the piles. Finally I reached for the first sheet.

  I spent most of the next five days in my room. No time for jogging, the chinning-bar or music. Sometimes things came back in the middle of the night. I’d get up and commit them to paper. It was less for the sake of his brain than for mine. I didn’t want the slightest snared memory to slip away again. I saw them as timid creatures emerging out of a dark forest. They gave me great pleasure. Sometimes it peaked to joy. And I was being paid for it. Only the need for food drove me out of that room.

  And when I sneaked down into the kitchen for one of Hanna’s cold specials I made another discovery. I was hardly bothered at all by the former dwellers of the space I passed through. As for the jerking dead, they’d totally vanished. I determined never to set foot in the cellar again. It was the source of the infection.

  Harvey came up quite often and talked to me through the door. I’d locked it. I didn’t want to be disturbed, I told him. How is it coming? he’d ask. Coming along fine, I’d reply. You remember lots of things? he’d ask. I always replied: more and more. Can I have it now? he always asked. It sounded like a plea for an urgently needed blood transfusion. Don’t disturb me, I’d reply. You’re driving it away. It was true. At that he’d leave very quietly.

  Finally on the sixth day he came in. I’d forgotten to lock the door. I was propped up in bed, scribbling away. It must have been noon. There was no point getting up early. I remembered just as well in bed. I’d dragged the desk over to the bedside. He looked down at the big pile alongside me. He took a sheet, stared at it, then took another sheet and finally the whole pile. He leafed through it faster and faster.

  “What the hell? Stamps?”

  “It started out with Fatty Berkowitz then it got onto the stamps. You remember, Saturday afternoons, the trading sessions? If you don’t remember, read this and it’ll all come back.”

  “Who gives a shit? About stamps? Or about Allan Berkowitz?”

  “Henry Berkowitz was one of the people you wanted to know about.”

  Two pages were enough, for Christ’s sake, he said. Who needed more than two pages on him? I’d done a hundred. And not even on Fatty Berkowitz. On stamps. He looked at the Rachel Rosen pile and of course saw that it had diminished. He wanted what I’d done on her, he said.

  But I hadn’t done anything on her yet. He hadn’t spoken of priority so I’d concentrated on one of the classmates, fat freckled stammering Henry Berkowitz and the three fabulous stamp-albums he used to lug over to Harvey’s on Saturday afternoons a million years ago. They were trading-sessions. I’d recalled my cigar-box and inside the gummed hinges and their sweet fishy taste, the tongs, the rectangular magnifying glass. I’d recalled Scott’s fat red catalog. It illustrated and priced impossible longed-for things. There were those rare inversions and tête-bêches (in all innocence), the fabulous 1856 British Guyana One-Cent Magenta valued at $50,000 then, the 1840 Penny Black with young Victoria in strange left-facing profile as if unwilling to view her future black dowager dumpiness. I saw my album with the map of the world and the intact British and French empires in pink and violet.

  Guard down, I can recall all those things in detail. Can wander about peacefully visit
ing them like museum displays. No chance of a trap springing for the time of the stamps and the other things associated with it like twilighting stick-ball, rainy day Monopoly, Red Rover Red Rover let Jerry come over, candles in papier-mâché pumpkins, etc. No chance of being caught back there.

  Anyhow, I was a subsidized memorialist now. I’d written tirelessly. It wasn’t all dry enumeration. It had narrational interest, comic episodes even. I’d reminded him of the stamps we used to swipe from Henry, how we’d also conned the fat heavy-tongued kid with stamps given ancient-looking fade in a Chlorax bath, clean-shaven monarchs bearded with indelible ink, figures modified to promote them out of the usual Scott 2-cent valuation. Harvey took care of the technical side and I delivered the glib sell. Henry’s incredible gullibility at all that remained comedy until one morning in bed at about eleven, almost half a century after the event, the idea occurred to me that Henry had known but had no friends and was prepared to pay that price for those Saturday afternoons.

  Hind-wit spoiled that cruel innocence. I got rid of Henry Berkowitz. I banished him and all other real persons from memory and concentrated on the stamps in my album.

  My pen could hardly keep up with them. The pleasure came from the things remembered of course but also from the exploit of being able to remember them. Had I got rid of cruelty entirely? It was meant for Harvey’s eyes too, after all. Wasn’t it something like a boastful display of memory, an Olympic pole-vaulter exercising before a paraplegic? I went on and on from Albania to Zanzibar.

  Of course the two pages he’d allotted to Fatty Berkowitz were insufficient for that. I borrowed blank pages from the other piles, mainly from Rachel Rosen’s. Part of the pleasure came from the way I was able to get back into my ten-year-old mind, taking at face value the lightweight lithographed world, that colorful paper conspiracy of silence against the real world like the two-rouble Moscow subway in the place of gulags or ten-penny cuddly kiwis instead of slaughtered Maoris, etc.

  But then I ventured too far out of that time of innocence. I couldn’t help remembering the day the real world erupted into my lithographed one and destroyed its fictions. Coming back from school I found my mother waiting for me in front of the apartment-house entrance. Because of her face I thought something had happened to my father. He had a heart condition. She said I was a practically a man now (a Mensch) and could understand. I was twelve. Poppa still hadn’t found work. We desperately needed money. She’d sold my stamp-collection. I consoled her.

  Poor Momma. How the bastard cheated her. It was worth three times that sixty-five dollars. When I learned where my album was I stuck the cigar-box with the gummed hinges, the tongs and the rectangular magnifying glass on the shelf of a closet, way back, behind other things. I was a Mensch. I stopped thinking about stamps, blanked it all out. Instinctively, till now, I’d avoided returning to that past joy because of the association with final disaster. It was a characteristic mental operation.

  Harvey didn’t even bother reading a single page of the precious things I’d recaptured. He finally came out and said that what he wanted was Rachel. To make up for all the paper I’d taken from her to record the stamps, he brought up a whole ream. Now there were nearly a thousand blank sheets available for Rachel Rosen.

  Alone in the room, I took a sheet and disposed of his third question on her. I told him that I had no ideas about the location of her room with regard to the later Anderson house. I wasn’t a surveyor. He was the one who’d seen the Anderson house being constructed on that lot. Couldn’t he remember?

  As for the description of her room, I’d been there, very briefly, twice, once with his mother and the other time with him. All I remembered was that her desk was always covered with math books. Also that there were two dolls propped up against the pillow of her bed. They had black button-eyes. Her unfriendly cat had been on the bed too. The cat’s name was “Mitzi” or “Mitsi.” When her tail coiled and she stared at you with those unblinking yellow eyes it was a dangerous sign. I once got scratched trying to pet her.

  That’s all I remembered about her room. I said that if more came back I’d give it to him. I reminded him that she’d lived with his family for two years. Her room had been on the same floor as his. Why did he need me? He must remember more things about her room than the dolls and the cat. His memory couldn’t be that bad.

  I got the paper back almost immediately, a fast correction job. The margins were crowded with comments in red ink defining our topsy-turvy roles: he the teacher, I the student. The only thing missing was a mark. It wouldn’t have been a pass. How come I remembered the dolls’ eyes and the cat’s and not hers? It couldn’t be true that I’d been in her room just twice. His memory wasn’t that bad.

  He repeated vocally what he’d written, over and over till his voice went out. I foresaw daily hassles with the bit-by-bit approach. I told him that criticism disturbed the flow of memory. He’d have to wait a while till I’d accumulated a hundred pages or so, then criticize all he liked.

  What could he say to that? Because of his silence I relented a little. I said that from time to time I’d let him have things. But no more harassing.

  I was still working on it, I said as the days went by. I tried to stay out of the room as long as possible, go jogging in any weather three times a day, once in a blinding snowstorm. He didn’t like jogging on company time. It did no good telling him I was multi-tracked mentally and could remember just as easily moving on my feet as seated at a desk. I was sentenced to the room. I listened to music behind the locked door clandestinely with earphones and tried to go on recalling stamps.

  A week went by.

  Almost finished? he began asking. I’m a slow rememberer, I said. I almost added: as slow remembering as picking up nickels and dimes. He shouldn’t be too impatient, shouldn’t nag me. Nagging disturbed the delicate balance of memory.

  He didn’t dare say anything after that. But sometimes I caught him staring intensely at my skull as though it harbored millions of images his machine could never get at. I remembered I’d promised him things from time to time.