Time Travail (7 page)

“Hanna. Doesn’t like the neighbors. To talk.
So I’m uncle. Think she’s ashamed. Age-difference. Not exactly May
and December affair, though. I’m December all right. Thirty-first
of December. Five to midnight. But she’s closer to August. Than to
May. Don’t know why it still bothers her. We don’t do it. Anymore.
I don’t, anyhow. She probably does. Right and left. Pretty good at
it. As I remember. Feel free. If you still can. She does the
housework. And the cooking. Drives me. To the hospital. For the
treatment. Lugs the equipment. See the shoulders on her? Tits to
match. Also she keeps people. Away.”

“She’s pretty good at that too. She doesn’t
seem to be all that great at housekeeping, though.”

“I’m not obsessive. About tidiness. Other
things to do.”

He grabbed my shoulder.

“Look. It’s coming. Look hard. This you won’t
forget.”

I stared at the screen. It stayed dark in the
darkness. Then there were a few preliminary diagonal light-streaks
like shooting stars. I waited for the thing to begin.

“You’re lucky,” he croaked. “It’s never been.
This good before.”

“Oh yes,” I said. I ventured: “Atomic
particles?”

“What?”

“Mesons? Dixons?”

“What are you. Talking about?”

“Those streaks, like shooting-stars. Gluons,
maybe?”

“Interference. Their goddam TVs in the
middle. Of the goddam afternoon. The housewives here. When they
aren’t getting screwed. On the sly. Spend the whole afternoon
looking at. Beverly Hills serials. That was interference you
saw.”

“What was it interfering with?”

“With ten years ago. Or twenty. Can’t tell.
Can’t pinpoint yet. Working on it. Right now what you’re looking
at. On that screen. Is at least ten years ago.”

The trouble was I couldn’t see anything on
the screen now that the interference had stopped. As a matter of
fact I couldn’t even see the screen. I vaguely made out the housing
unit but the screen itself was as dark as the darkness that
surrounded us. I told him this.

He said in his mutilated delivery that it
wasn’t the same darkness. The darkness we were in was contemporary
darkness but the darkness on the screen was the darkness of the
cellar years ago. He’d learned to tell the difference. The dials
confirmed it anyhow.

First of all I had to understand that he had
tremendously increased the temporal range of the machine. He had
gone far beyond the fraction of a second’s recuperation of the
dying mouse I’d witnessed long ago. Of course he’d prefer something
more spectacular than old darkness but that had to do with the
spatial stricture. The machine captured only events in a radius of
a few yards. Very little had been going on in this part of the
cellar except darkness. His old lab had been in a corner and walled
off. Maybe once a week his father used to come down to check the
heating unit. The machine had never captured that moment so
far.

Navigation was a big problem. Recent events
were really hard to pinpoint. About two months ago for two seconds
on the screen he saw himself looking at the same screen. He was
wearing the wig (had I noticed he was wearing a wig?) so that meant
it was less than a year ago. The treatment had started a year ago,
the necessity for a wig two months later. It had been a beautiful
clear image.

But the really exciting exception to old
darkness wasn’t that. Last week, he said, he’d seen me on the bike
pedaling for the Static Electricity Machine. Did I remember the
Static Electricity Machine? It was pure luck, a quirk almost. The
machine (this one here) was situated exactly on the site of the
shack, but deeper of course. Vertical differential was normally a
barrier to reception. For example he’d never been able to
recuperate Momma up on the ground floor. But I had come through, he
said, more or less. The image was so bad he hadn’t been able to
make out my face. The further back you went the dimmer the image
got, got very, very dim, flickering and distorted.

But it could only have been me. I was the one
who always pedaled. That’s what had given him the idea of
contacting me.

From the top of the stairs the woman banged
twice on the door. It sounded as if her fist would splinter
through. She yelled that the mail had come. She needed him. There
was a letter from the bank.

That made me think of the $1,000 check he’d
sent me. Again I wondered if there was anything behind it. By now I
was certain he was crazy. It’s a well-known fact that cellars all
over the country are full of nuts slaving over utopian contraptions
like perpetual-motion machines and water-fueled engines. These were
less wacky than a time machine. But he had even more reason than
the rest of us to be crazy, to want to reverse the flow of
time.

He pressed a button and the red lights came
back on. We slowly climbed up out of the cellar. As we left a
mechanism whirred and the red lights went out and the cellar was
black beneath us.

***

Four

When we came into the living room the
gigantic woman was making room on the table, shoving the newspapers
to one side. She had her blouse on but hadn’t bothered buttoning
it. The TV was roaring with canned laughter at a sit-com. I was
about to ask where the phone was when Harvey croaked that I should
sit down. I could hardly make him out. I went over and switched the
sound off the sit-com. I got a murderous look from her. It must
have reminded her of what I’d done to the lawn mower. I pushed a
rumpled stocking off a chair and sat down. She opened a loose-leaf
notebook and stared down at it and then at the bank-statement.

“It’s like I said. We lost more than five
thousand on Bell South last month. I told you we should’ve gotten
rid of it. How many times did I tell you that?” To the invisible
witnesses: “How many times did I tell him that?”

“
Hanna. Takes care of the investments,”
Harvey said to me, ignoring her.
“Consultative voice.
Normal.
Gets it all. When I
croak. Don’t mean the way I’m croaking now. Mean the big croak.
That puts an end. To this kind of croaking. Gets it if she’s a good
girl. And behaves properly. To our guest.”

She looked at me murderously again. Harvey
asked me if I wanted to see what Hanna got if she behaved.

He showed me the monthly statement, black on
white from NationsBank. A little over $300,000 in US Government
bonds. About $400,000 in a Prime Money Market account. Practically
$500,000 in blue chips: AT&T, Bell South, Exxon, IBM, etc. A
stab of envy. I wondered where it came from. His parents had been
of modest means.

He was a millionaire in a pigsty. I felt
relief for that $1,000 check of his but still wanted to get to the
phone.

She went on with the position of the
securities one by one. He didn’t answer. He sat motionless. His
eyes were closed. He seemed to be asleep or dead. I got up and went
outside into the mowed part of the garden. The heat and sunshine
and the smell of the cut grass were pleasant.

The blonde was still there but on her knees
now, planting tulip-bulbs in the long flowerbed that ran the length
of the hurricane-fence. We chatted through it about flowers and
authors as she made holes. Her hand-tool made a hole in a single
movement. Pop went the tulip-bulb into the hole and was given a
deft burial. Then she repeated the operation. With her head bent
down to the flowerbed her face had color and when she smiled she
lost about ten years. With certain movements her modestly
unbuttoned blouse fell away from her body and at that angle you
could see small sharp-pointed breasts. Her bent-forward position
gave them deceptive youth and firmness. Kneeling like that in the
flowerbed was the best position for her.

Just to say something I said she wasn’t like
some women, afraid of getting their hands dirty. Overreacting to
the remark, she said she could garden all her life and after life
too. If heaven was the Garden of Eden she wouldn’t ask for wings or
a harp but a spade and a rake. If that’s where she was going, she
said.

She paused. Her mind must have been making
opposite associations because then she spoke about how she’d once
transplanted a climbing rose to the fence, her side. She thought
she could on her side. Just as it was about to bloom, yellow-pink
flowers with “heavenly fragrance,”
Sutter’s Gold
it was called, that terrible woman clipped it at
the base saying she had no right to plant anything against their
fence. And apparently that was true. She hadn’t been able to sleep
a wink that night, she said. It was silly weeping over a
rose-plant.

When she got up, clapping the dirt off her
hands, the color drained out of her face. Time and gravity took
charge of her breasts. She asked more questions about poets. Keats
and Shelley led to her son who used to write such beautiful poems.
That was before a certain problem. Since the problem he didn’t
write any more. If somebody who knew – an expert, not just his
mother – could tell him how good his poems were maybe he’d want to
go back to writing and that would help with the problem. She got
confused with her explanations and what she didn’t want to explain.
Finally her tongue moistened her lips nervously and she said:

“Maybe you wouldn’t mind just glancing at
some of his poems, Professor? I could show them to you tomorrow
afternoon.”

Springing the outrageous request on such
short acquaintanceship she caught me off balance. Instead of
summoning up a mysterious wounded expression and answering as I
always did in such circumstances, “I can’t, simply can’t, please
don’t ask me why,” I felt safe enough to reply that I’d have loved
to read his poems but was leaving the next day, first thing in the
morning. I invented an excuse for returning to the house before she
had the idea of showing me the poems on the spot.

I found his phone in the corridor. It was an
early flight but not early enough for me.

I returned to the living room. They were
still at it there. She was assessing General Electric. “What time
do you folks eat around here?” I asked in a pause. It was nearly
seven. I’d had an early sandwich for lunch. “The refrigerator’s in
the kitchen,” she said and returned to GE. Harvey added that
mealtimes were very flexible. I didn’t have to worry about
formality here. You ate when you were hungry. The refrigerator was
always full of food. Himself, he ate down in the cellar.

I went into the grubby kitchen. The sink was
full of dirty dishes. I opened the refrigerator. The cold didn’t
keep down the moldy smell. There were unidentifiable bits of meat
dried to greenish leather, layers of thawed pizzas, soup-plates
heaped high with noodles. Just breathing through the nostrils and
looking at what the refrigerator held solved the hunger problem on
a short-time basis. Then I practically bolted out of the kitchen.
I’d finally noticed the roaches on the floor, the walls, on top of
the refrigerator. They were holding a national convention on the
dirty dishes in the sink. I’d rather face a Bengal tiger than a
cockroach.

Later Harvey took me up to his old bedroom.
It was mine now, he said. He slept down in the cellar on a cot. He
looked at his watch and went down to his machine. I’d forgotten to
tell him I wouldn’t be staying. I’d leave him a note.

The bedroom looked as if it hadn’t been lived
in for years. There was dust everywhere and a big spider on the
floor. At least it was dead, probably from asphyxiation. I tried to
open the window. It was stuck. Struggling with it I saw the picture
window in the neighboring living room and the blonde sprinkling
something into a goldfish bowl. She was talking, either to someone
I couldn’t see or to the goldfish. I gave up on the window and
examined the bedding very carefully before I committed myself. The
sheets were clammy but uninhabited.

A banging noise woke me up. In the darkness I
didn’t know where or when I was and turned around to Mary and
embraced emptiness. I caught up on time and remembered Mary wasn’t
associated with bed anymore but with alimony, retroactive bed-toll.
Someone was banging feebly on the door then pushed it open and
stepped inside. Light blinded me.

I struggled to a seated position. Harvey was
panting from the flights of stairs. His voice was terrible. He told
me to hurry down into the cellar, never mind about dressing. It was
a breakthrough, I made out. I remembered what I’d seen or rather
hadn’t seen on the screen.

“Let me sleep,” I mumbled. “Go back to bed.”
I retreated beneath the sheet head and all. He brought out:

“Who has time? To sleep? It’s got me. By the
balls. By the throat.”

He nagged at me, we were wasting time, I had
to get up and go down to the cellar. When I didn’t answer he
finally said that was what I was there for, to help him. It was
part of the contract, he said. I sat up at this and told him I had
signed no contract. I’d come here on a trial basis and, sorry, I’d
decided not to buy. I was leaving first thing tomorrow morning.

I peered at my watch. It was already first
thing in the morning. There was a little light in the sky, what you
could see of the sky through the dirty panes and the branches of
that badly planted elm.

I wasn’t tired any more. I got out of bed and
started dressing. I decided to skip the morning toilet. I would
walk back to the terminal.

“You can’t. Go. You can’t. Leave me.”

“I’ve got this thing about roaches,” I said,
buttoning my shirt.

“For Christ’s sake. Roaches. Hanna’ll pick
up. Roach-powder tomorrow.”

“They’ll come back. They like dirt. I don’t.
And I don’t like frozen pizza. I can’t stand disorder either, it’s
too biographical. And I don’t like Hanna. She murders climbing
roses.” I tied my shoelaces.