Time and Again (5 page)

"Yes, sir;
Huckleberry Finn."

"Right. Well, that's how I feel about the day you're going to have now. Take him away, Rube. There's lots to show him, and we're in a hurry now." He raised a wrist to look at his watch. "Bring him to the cafeteria at noon."

3

Out in the corridors as I walked along with Rube, people passed us, moving to and from offices. They were men and women, mostly young, and whenever one walked by, speaking or nodding to Rube, he or she would glance at me curiously. Rube was watching me, I saw, smiling a little, and when I looked at him he said, "What do you think you're going to see?"

I tried to find an answer but had to shake my head. "I haven't a glimmering, Rube."

"Well, I'm sorry to be so damn mysterious. But it's the director who explains this, not me. And you have to see it before he can explain it." We turned a corner and then another, into a corridor considerably narrower than the others. We turned once more, and now we were walking along a narrow aisle that stretched ahead for a considerable distance.

One wall of the aisle was blank. The other was a series of tinted windows through which we could see into what Rube told me were instruction rooms. The first three were empty and were fitted out as ordinary classrooms. There were six or eight one-armed wooden chairs in each, the arms widening into writing surfaces; there were blackboards, bookshelves, teachers' desks and chairs. At the fourth window two men were sitting in the same kind of room, one at the desk, the other in a wooden chair facing him, and we stopped to watch. "We can see in, they can't see out," Rube said. "Everyone knows it; it's just a matter of not disturbing people at work."

The man in the student's chair was talking, steadily but with frequent pauses, sometimes rubbing his face in thought. He was about forty, thin and dark, and wore a navy-blue sweater and a white shirt open at the collar. The instructor at the desk was younger and wore a brown tweed sport coat. Beside the window on a stainless-steel wall plate was a pair of buttons. Rube pushed one and now we could hear the speaking man's voice from a loudspeaker behind a grill over the window.

It was a foreign language, and after a dozen seconds or so I thought I recognized it and was about to say so, then I stopped. I'd thought it was French, a language I can recognize, but now I wasn't sure. I stood listening carefully; some of the words were French, I was almost certain, but pronounced not quite correctly. He kept on, fluently enough, the instructor occasionally correcting pronunciation, which the other would repeat a few times before continuing. "Is it French?"

From the way Rube smiled I knew he'd been waiting for the question. "Yep. But medieval French; no one has talked like that in four hundred years." He pressed the other button, and the loudspeaker went silent, the man's lips continuing to move, and we walked on. At the next window Rube jabbed the speaker button, I heard a stifled grunt and the clash of wood on wood, then I stopped beside him and stood looking into the room.

It was completely bare, the walls padded and faced with heavy canvas; in it two men were fighting with bayonet-tipped rifles. One wore the shallow helmet, high-necked khaki blouse, and roll-puttees of a First World War American uniform. The other wore the black boots, gray uniform, and deep flared helmet of the Germans. The bayonets were an odd false-looking silver, and I saw that they were painted rubber. The men's faces were shiny with sweat, their uniforms stained at armpits and back, and as we watched they parried and riposted, heaved and shoved, grunting as the rifles clashed. Suddenly the German stepped back fast, feinted, sidestepped a counterthrust, and drove his rifle straight into the other's stomach, the rubber bayonet bending double against the khaki. "You're dead, pig of an American!" he yelled, and the other shouted, "Hell I am, that's just a little stomach wound!" They both started laughing, jabbing away at each other, and Rube stood glaring in at them, muttering, "Wrong, wrong, the bastards! An absolutely wrong attitude!" I glanced at him: He looked mean and dangerous, his lips set, eyes narrowed. For a moment longer he stared in silence, then punched the cutoff button hard with his thumb and swung away from the window.

A dozen men sat in the next room. Most of them wore white carpenter's overalls; a few were in blue jeans and work shirts. Beside the desk a man in khaki wash pants and shirt stood pointing with a ruler at a cardboard model which completely covered the desk top. It was a model of a room, one wall missing like a stage set, and the man was pointing to the miniature ceiling. Rube pushed the button beside the window."…painted beams. But only at the highest ceiling points, where it's dark." The ruler moved to a wall. "Down here begin real oak beams, and real plaster. Mixed with straw; don't forget that, damn it." Rube poked the cutoff button, and once more we walked on.

The next room was empty of people, but an immense aerial photograph of a town covered three walls from floor to ceiling, and we stopped and looked at it. It had been labeled with a black marking pen: WIN-FIELD, VERMONT. RESTORATION IN PROGRESS, VIEW 9 OF ELEVEN, SERIES 14. I looked at Rube and he knew I was looking, but he offered no explanation, simply continuing to stare at the big photo, and I silently refused to offer a question.

The next two rooms were empty. In the following room the chairs had been shoved back to the walls, and a good-looking girl was dancing the Charleston to music from a portable windup phonograph on the desk. A middle-aged woman stood watching her, beating time with a forefinger. The swaying hem of the girl's tan dress came to just above her flying knees, and the waist of her dress wasn't much higher. Her hair was cut in what I knew was once called a shingle bob, and she was chewing gum. The older woman was dressed in pretty much the same way, though her skirt was longer.

Rube pushed the speaker button, and we heard the fast rhythmical shuffle of the girl's feet, and the thin, ghostly sound of a long-ago orchestra. The music stopped suddenly with an old-fashioned fillip, and the girl stood breathing audibly, smiling at the older woman, who nodded approvingly and said, "Good! That was the ant's ankles," and on that neat exit line Rube pushed the speaker button, trying not to smile, and we walked on, neither of us saying a word.

There were three more rooms, all empty of people, but in the next-to-last a dozen dressmaker's dummies stood ranged beside the instructor's desk. On the seat of one of the chairs lay a pile of white cardboard boxes that looked as though they might contain clothes.

Again we were walking briskly along skylighted corridors past numbered doors and black-and-white nameplates: D.W. McELROY; AN. BURKE AND HELEN FRIEDMAN, ACCOUNTING; N.O. DEMPSTER; FILE ROOM B. Rube was spoken to by, and he replied to, nearly everyone we passed; the men were more often than not dressed informally, wearing sweaters, sport coats, sport shirts, although some wore suits and ties. The women and girls, some very nice-looking, dressed the way they usually do in offices. Two men in overalls edged past us, pushing a heavy wooden handcart, trundling a motor or piece of machinery of some sort, partly covered by a tarpaulin. Then Rube stopped at a door no different from any of the others except that it was labeled with only a number, no nameplate. He opened it, gesturing me in first.

A man behind a small desk was on his feet before my foot crossed the threshold; it was a bare little anteroom, the desk and chair and nothing else in it. Rube said, "Morning, Fred," and the man said, "Morning, sir." He wore a green nylon zipper jacket, his shirt was open at the neck, and he had no insignia or weapon I could see, but I knew he was a guard: He had the shoulders, chest, neck, and wrists of a powerful man, and the only thing he was doing in here was reading a copy of
Esquire.

Set flush in the wall behind the desk was a steel door. It was knobless, and along one edge were three brass keyholes spaced a few inches apart. Rube brought out a key ring, selected a key, then walked around the desk, inserted the key in the topmost lock, and turned it. From his watch pocket he took a single key, pushed it into the middle keyhole, and turned. The guard stood waiting beside him, and now the guard inserted a key in the bottom keyhole, turned it and pulled the door open with the key. Rube removed his two keys and gestured me in through the open door before him. He followed, and the door swung solidly shut behind us. I heard the multiple click of the locks engaging, and we were standing in a space hardly larger than a big closet, dimly lighted by an overhead bulb in a wire cage. Then I saw that we were at the top of a circular metal staircase.

Rube leading the way, we walked down for maybe ten feet, almost in darkness at first but descending into light; from the last stair we stepped onto a metal-grill floor. Except for the metal floor we were in a space very much like the one we had just come from. Along two walls ran a narrow unpainted wood shelf; on this lay a dozen pairs of shapeless boots made of inch-thick gray felt. They were awkward-looking things made to come up over the ankles, with buckles like galoshes. Rube said, "They pull over your shoes; find a pair that fits well enough so they won't drop off." He nodded at a metal door before us. "Once we go in, it has to be quiet, quiet, quiet all the way. No loud or sharp sounds, though we can talk softly; the sound seems to go up."

I nodded; my pulse, I knew, wouldn't be normal now. What in the
hell
were we going to see? We fastened the buckles of our boots — they were clumsy and too warm — then Rube pushed open the door, a heavy swinging door without knob or lock, and we stepped out, the door swinging shut behind us without a squeak.

We were standing on a catwalk, a narrower extension of the metal-grill floor on the other side of the door just behind us. Only a waist-high railing of steel rods that seemed too thin to me prevented our falling over the edge. My hand was gripping the top rail far more tightly than necessary, but I couldn't relax it and I didn't feel like walking on, because the catwalk under our feet was part of a vast spider web of metal-grill walks hanging in the air over an enormous block-square, five-story-deep well of space, the walks connecting and interconnecting, converging and angling off into the distance.

This great lacy web of narrow metal walkways hung from the roof — which was the underside of the office space we'd just left — by finger-thin metal rods. As we stood there, Rube giving me time to accept the necessity of walking out onto the web, I couldn't yet see anything below us except the tops of thick walls which rose up from the floor of the gutted warehouse five stories below to within a foot of the underside of the walkways we stood on. These walls, I could see, divided the great block-square space below us into large irregular-shaped areas. I looked up and saw a mass of air ducts and subduedly humming machinery suspended from the roof; then I glanced back at Rube. He was smiling at the look of my face. He said, "I know, it's a shock. Just take your time, get used to it. When you're ready, walk on out, anywhere you like."

I made myself walk then, maybe ten feet straight ahead, barely able to resist hanging onto the railings, and still unable to look down. For a few feet the walk led straight out from the door we'd come in through. Then it angled to the right, and I was aware that we passed over the top of a wall that rose from the floor far below almost to the underside of our walk. As we crossed over this wall, I felt a steady updraft of warmth and heard the hum of exhaust fans overhead. Just below the level of the catwalks rows of metal piping hung over the wall tops in places; clamped to them were hundreds of hooded theatrical lights. They seemed to be of every color and shade and of every size; all of them were aimed in groups to converge on specific areas below. I stopped, turned to the side, gripped the railing with both hands, and forced myself to look down.

Five stories below and on the far side of the area over which we were standing, I saw a small frame house. From this angle I could see onto the roofed front porch. A man in shirt-sleeves sat on the edge of the porch, his feet on the steps. He was smoking a pipe, staring absently out at the brick-paved street before the house.

On each side of this house stood portions of two other houses. The side walls facing the middle house were complete, including curtains and window shades. So were half of each gable roof and the entire front walls, including porches with worn stair treads. A wicker baby-carriage stood on the porch of one of them. But except for the complete house in the middle these others were only the two walls and part of a roof; from here I could see the pine scaffolding that supported them from behind. In front of all three structures were lawns and shade trees. Beyond these were a brick sidewalk and a brick street, iron hitching posts at the curbs. Across the street stood the fronts of half a dozen more houses. On the porch of one lay a battered bicycle. A fringed hammock hung on the porch of another. But these apparent houses were only false fronts no more than a foot thick; they were built along the area wall behind them, concealing the wall.

Leaning on the rail beside me, Rube said, "From where the man on the porch is sitting and from any window of his house or any place on his lawn, he seems to be in a complete street of small houses. You can't see it from here, but at the end of the short stretch of actual brick street he is facing now, there is painted and modeled on the area wall, in meticulous dioramic perspective, more of the same street and neighborhood far into the distance."

While he was talking a boy on a bike appeared on the street below us; I didn't see where he'd come from. He wore a white sailor cap, its turned-up brim nearly covered with what looked like colored advertising-and campaign-buttons; short brown pants that buckled just below the knees; long black stockings; and dirty canvas shoes that came up over the ankles. Hanging from his shoulder by a wide strap was a torn canvas sack filled with folded newspapers. The boy pedaled from one side of the street to the other, steering with one hand, expertly throwing a folded paper up onto each porch. As he approached the complete house, the man on the porch stood up, the boy tossed the paper, the man caught it, and sat down again, unfolding it. The boy threw a paper onto the porch of the false two-walled house next door, which stood on a corner. Then he pedaled around the corner, and — out of sight of the man on the porch now — got off his bike and walked it to a door in the area wall against which the little cross street abruptly ended. He opened the door and wheeled his bike on through it.