Time Travail (35 page)

Up yours, she finally said. Not just to get
even with him. She’d learned to associate the reek of the drug
there with the machine and his sinking condition. So he deputized
me to look into it, to see his doctor at the hospital.

I agreed if only to fill the present. That’s
all I had now. Ever since that machine-assisted trip I was cured of
my own time-travels. I was delivered of the past. There were no
more time-traps. I was in full possession of the present and didn’t
know what to do with it. It was empty. I was like a man who’d
constructed his existence about a grave malady and suddenly finds
himself cured with no alternative existence conceivable.

Sometimes I wondered if my homemade images of
the past hadn’t been devalued by that machine-assisted trip back to
mid-July 1952.

By now I was inclined to think it had really
been a trip of sorts. The beloved dead stored in my mind were clear
and in color but somehow (despite all the things I’d told Harvey
about the superiority of the images in my head to the images on his
screen) lacking something essential. The two women I’d seen were
splotched and blurred and flickering but they were authentic. This
feeling had been building up steadily in the days that followed the
trip. And now, slowly, I explored the idea that for some reason the
distortion wasn’t in Mrs Morgenstern and my mother chatting away in
the striped and flowered armchairs. They were there integral and I
had been there too, part of me anyhow, but there had been some kind
of shifting dirty veil between us, much closer to me than to them.
Sometimes I could almost believe that the distorting veil was a
defect or inadequacy of my perception.

So to occupy the present I went outside, for
the first time in weeks, not counting my contractual garden fires.
The daylight glared painfully. Going past I was careful not to look
at the other house with the tulips and the iron deer. As soon as I
was a mile or so from the two houses I began feeling much
better.

There was irony in what Harvey’s doctor told
me when I asked for more marijuana for him. He said that marijuana
had no curative virtues so far as the disease was concerned.
Simply, it attenuated the nausea of the ray and chemotherapy
treatment. But since Mr Morgenstern refused that treatment there
was no need for marijuana any more. He’d refused the treatment, I
knew, because it blocked time-travel. But for successful
time-travel marijuana was apparently indispensable. It was some
sort of vicious circle.

I told the doctor that maybe he’d developed a
taste for joints independent of their therapeutic value. If it
helped stave up his morale why shouldn’t he be issued more? He
shrugged and said that didn’t concern the hospital. If what I said
about his morale was true, marijuana wasn’t all that difficult to
find was it? I shouldn’t quote him.

When I explained why I’d come back
empty-handed Harvey repeated the doctor’s words. Marijuana
shouldn’t be that hard to find. Half the population of the United
States smoked it. The other half must peddle it. Tomorrow I was to
pick up five hundred dollars’ worth.

Easy to say, “Go out and pick up five hundred
dollars’ worth of marijuana,” but where do you go? who do you ask?
You can’t sidle up to unknown people and proposition them. You have
to be sidled up to and propositioned.

So I walked about Spanish Harlem, aimless and
yet expectative, hoping to be propositioned and dreading it. Hadn’t
I read about come-on dealers who at the moment of transaction flash
their badge and snap cuffs on you? If it had been a dozen joints,
OK, but he wanted me to buy enough for months. How many years could
you get for that?

I strolled past immobile figures in shabby
doorways and when I felt magic X-ray tube stares at the virile
bulge the five-hundred-dollar roll made in my pocket, walked
faster. But I wasn’t mugged or propositioned. You felt they were
nocturnal activities. The dealers and muggers must have been
snoring the profitless daylight hours away. I’d be damned if I’d
venture into that neighborhood at night.

I tried shabby bars with crude green and
orange neons. In one bar I drank beer next to a smoking young
couple. Wasn’t it that? “Good stuff,” I said expertly. I got a
clammed-up narrow-eyed response. In another bar I surprised myself
humming
La
Cucaracha
over more
beer. It wasn’t meant to be a signal. Ideas and feelings prompt
music in me spontaneously. Minor triumphs come out as imperial
Handel. Grief is usually orchestrated by slow Purcell. At one
stocktaking period of my life it bothered me, this expression of
feeling in other men’s definitive formulations, a kind of emotional
prosthesis.

Anyhow the girl behind the bar looked at
me as I hummed away. She was a cute little Hispano trick with a mop
of frizzy black hair and a big crimson mouth over a lovely weak
chin. “You wan somethin else?” It was no crime to sing the words of
an old Mexican song. “
Ya no tengo que fumar
,” I sang low but distinctly. She pointed to a
shelf with cigarettes. I shook my head. “All we got,” she said. Her
boy friend came over and asked me belligerently what I wanted.
“Nada,” I replied like a character in a Hemingway story, paid and
left.

The second day was like the first. At day’s
end I found myself on a Washington Square bench for nostalgia’s
sake, selectively watching students swaying past.

The man on the other end of my bench must
have been deep in his eighties, but natty and spry, insistently at
peace with the universe, smiling benignly at the pigeons and
perambulated babies, then at me, then at the sky, then at me. He
gave off eau de cologne. It must have taken him half the day to get
dressed for his daily show on the bench where he scored with his
expensive UK shoes, flannel trousers, monogrammed blazer,
polka-dotted blue scarf to hide age at his throat, pink silk shirt,
cuffs half-hiding the wormy veins of his hands.

Seeing that, I thought that to be tolerable
extreme old age must be assumed utterly as Rembrandt’s aged did or
like a Hindu fakir with metaphysical bony nakedness beneath the
white tangle of hair and beard. Actually I couldn’t imagine myself
ever assuming it any way or it ever being tolerable. But I couldn’t
imagine griming it either as he did. Maybe the solution is not to
get that far.

Now Natty Spry was peering at me. I peered
back. A familiar younger face haunted the present wreckage. He
recognized me first.

“
Why goodness gracious, I know you. Oh
you’ve aged greatly but you’ve still got those eyes. You were such
a handsome boy. A C- student as I remember but strikingly handsome.
Your eyes haven’t changed one bit.
Old turquoise. Chinese
grave-jade.
My heart used to
beat. How disruptive you were for the girls in my class and for me.
Cruel. Your name is Whiteman, Gerald.”

That fussily precise voice. I knew who he was
now. Mr Venezelous, my English instructor at NYU almost forty years
ago, Greek in every sense of the word. That C- was faulty memory or
characteristic waspishness. I’d been his best student. He’d kept on
inviting me up to his place just off Washington Square for a drink.
I accepted, once. It turned out there were other things involved
with the drink, not just salmon-eggs and Greek olives.

“Whiteman, Gerald,” he repeated triumphantly.
“Is that true or is that not true?”

“Weizman, Jerry,” I corrected.

I was impressed anyhow, despite that C- slip.
Would my axons and cerebella peduncles be performing like that in
undesired twenty-five years’ time?

“Yes,” he said triumphantly as though I’d
confirmed not corrected. “You’ve aged beautifully, Gerald. It’s an
art, as you can see.” He smiled modestly on perfect teeth and
started musing audibly.

“
Gerald Whiteman the womanizer. Gerald the
masher. The heart-smasher. The juvenile Don Juan. How well I recall
you.” It was another impressive performance. He was as good as
Roget’s Thesaurus. Now he forgot me completely. “Hello, baby!” Was
he talking to the passing mother or to her child? “Marvelous day,”
he congratulated the sky, then returned to me. “Despite those eyes
one of my worst students as I remember. And I remember pretty damn
well. A straight-F student. Gerald and the Three Fs. O that lovely
pink cloud up there.” I followed his gaze. The sky was uniformly
leaden. “O the birds, flocks of birds!” A solitary pigeon flew
overhead. A dachshund waddled over and sniffed his beautifully
stitched black shoes. “Meeow,” he greeted. “O the terrible great
puma.
Don’t devour me.”

Would I be like that in a few years? If you
absolutely couldn’t avoid getting that far maybe it was the best
way to be after all.

He took out a gold-plated case, extracted a
thin cigarette and lit up with a gold-plated Ronson.

Could it be? Could. Was. The unmistakable
reek, creator of pink cloud, puma, the dead chatting
three-dimensional in elongated time.

He smiled with delight when I opened up to
him about my quest and told me about grades and qualities,
about
charas,
bhang, takrouri
,
sweet
dawamesk
, the
divine
gandjah
. Above
all, in what bar and at what times and what the purveyor looked
like. He even told me the color of his eyes.

I came back with only a fraction of what
Harvey had wanted. I was taking no chances being nabbed with five
hundred dollars’ worth of the stuff. As it was, with the little I
had stashed under the right front-seat, I drove back to Forest Hill
very slowly, very carefully, sweating profusely.

Refueled, Harvey returned to the cellar and
the helmet and explored the chemically enhanced past. I lay on my
back on the bed and explored the unimproved present, my only
temporal dimension now. It’s a hard one to be stranded in when it
consists exclusively of somebody else’s four walls, drawn curtains
and a blank ceiling. My passport had expired to all other places
and times.

One long night there was another storm. The
wind howled and buffeted the house. I tried to imagine it wrenched
loose and sailing seawards. Ash-can covers started on their noisy
trip down the street. Was she chasing hers? The tree outside
threshed about like posthumous Schubert. The dull thumping started
up again. It kept banging against the house like a fist against a
locked door. I counted and counted but this time it didn’t put me
to sleep. I’d have to remember to get Hanna to climb up that ladder
and saw the branch off.

I’d said never again and also not that way
but I ended up returning there Harvey’s way. Maybe the distortion
had been in me. It was to better her, if the thing could be done,
rid her of splotch and flicker, restore her eyes, bring her into
three dimensions and color, to see her lips better. See her the way
Harvey had. Maybe she was saying other things. It was to see her
again, any way and to experience joy doing it.

Once again I muffed the techniques of
time-navigation and Harvey had to do it for me. It irritated him.
Once again he said he’d try to simplify the entry procedures and
write it down for me. I sat down coiffed at the console before the
screen, at time-ratio 1:20, feeling muddled and queasy from the
preparatives to voyage. I imagined in shame Keith seeing his father
that way.

This time the image opened up. I entered. I
wasn’t outside looking in but inside with her. There was her face
in random selection interrupted by the billowing curtain and a fly
on a windowpane. Where is the promised color and dimension? The
room is still blotch and blur and flicker and silence like the
grave. All I’m getting is the feeling, stronger, of authenticity
(that she is there and me with her a very little bit). Now closer,
great imperfect close-ups of her face. But there’s nothing of the
promised joy. She’s still eyeless. I see the illness that will
painfully kill her soon, it’s a certitude, a kind of time-travel
forward. Now the billowing drapes, gray sunflowers, over and over.
Now the fly crawling up the windowpane. Bigger and bigger. Now her
lips also macro, crevassed. I try to read the meaning of those
moving lips. This is the fourth time after the gray sunflowers and
the fly and I think what she is saying is: “My Jerry’s never been
the same either.” She’s starting to fade, the billowing gray
flowers too, the gigantic black and hairy fly too and now emergence
with hopeless grief.

Emergence from that first enhanced voyage a
year ago with grieved awareness of the joint-butts and the empty
bottle at my feet and the possible self-swindle of it all. Also
emergence from it a year later, now, without nausea but with the
original grief. It was a time-trap again. I got sucked down into
there and then.

What did I do then a year ago in the same
position as now?

What I could do now.

Took off the helmet and groped upstairs.
Blundered out into the meaningless real world, the garden. I was
blinded by the high sun.

I’d started the trip at eleven in the
evening.

It was noon the next day.

That fifteen-minute trip had lasted thirteen
hours and nine minutes of here-time, real-time. The ratio had
expanded, wildly. Way more than 1:20. And in the wrong direction.
Tit-time for him there, maybe. It had been plated tortoise-time for
me. My forehead burned violently.

I was retching up nothing painfully into the
tangle of new and dead grass under the elm when I heard her voice,
more detached than anxious. “Are you sick too?” I couldn’t answer.
“Everybody’s down with it at Dave and Tom’s. It’s Singapore flu. Or
Taiwanese. I have things to settle your stomach with in the house,
if you like. Oh God, was I sick. I thought I’d die.”