Time Travail (12 page)

Then steady cold rain set in so I had the
best of reasons for not going out into the garden except to burn
the rubbish, with Harvey looking on. Anyhow I had plenty to do
inside.

Harvey had just about finished with the
sensors. I varnished them, three coats, careful to avoid the big
zoom lens. Now there were the unavoidable preliminaries to setting
them up in the living room. He didn’t want any of the local people
to do the job. He saw spies everywhere. So he had me ring up a man
twenty miles away. I was in charge of the negotiations too. Harvey
was too dumb for that in the vocal sense and Hanna in the other
sense. Anyhow she didn’t know what was involved. When she learned,
said Harvey, she’d have a shit-hemorrhage.

I remember the slow incredulous look on
the big Irishman’s face when I explained what we wanted. Out of
some half-assed sense of professional pride he said, “I can’t
do
that
.” As though
I were asking him to contract-kill a nun instead of just knocking
four good-size holes in the living room floor. I invented a reason:
a new kind of central heating system. It turned out the man was an
expert on central heating systems. “Mister, you don’t run pipes up
in
four
holes.” For
what Harvey intended you did. He’d explained that the tubes had to
be separate, couldn’t be run together in a single hole because of
the induction fields. I couldn’t tell the man this.

Finally he did the job, grim-faced. He didn’t
even say good-bye when he finished.

Hanna went wild. The filthy mess everywhere,
mummified meat in the refrigerator, armies of cockroaches, where
was the problem? But not this. She had a thing about the machine in
the cellar. She must have regarded it as a rival. Also I think she
was scared of it. As things turned out she had good reason to
be.

So far at least it had been kept down in the
cellar where she seldom went. But now it was metastasizing in the
living room. From the cellar four flexible tubes with the girth of
an adult boa constrictor emerged in each corner and snaked, each
one, into a big oblong black box with a protruding lens. When the
apparatus in the cellar operated, the housing of the lens was
disquietingly mobile. With a whirring sound the Cyclops eye would
slowly move vertically and horizontally. Sometimes it would slowly
zoom out, like a robot’s erection. You’d have sworn it was tracking
you instead of long-dead people whose space you were occupying.
Remembering this didn’t make the whirring sound less
disquieting.

That was later. For the moment each eye was
staring blind and immobile in its corner.

The day we tested it out Harvey edicted a
celebration. Strangely: before, not after. He was so sure of
himself. He’d never heard of
hubris
(“overweening God-defiant pride,” I’d defined the concept
to my students). Suddenly after months and months he noticed the
mess. He made Hanna clean up the living room, a very little bit.
She banged all the furniture viciously with the vacuum cleaner. The
dust-bag must have been full or the dirt encrusted because the
machine’s passage made no impression on the carpet. She did get rid
of the dish with Rice Krispies glued to the sides, actually took it
into the kitchen. I’d seen it there on the table the first day I
came. Now there was a wreath of dried milk as a
memorial.

He had her bring out a bottle of sweet
white wine (
Lord’s Vineyards
: the grower’s name was Philip Lord) and three red
cut-glass goblets. I vaguely remembered the goblets from thirty
years back. They were dusty and chipped now. The white wine looked
like coagulated blood in them. As I was sipping the sickening stuff
he told me to smile. “Maybe you’ll be seeing yourself. As you were
now. In half an hour.” The thought made me feel self-conscious in
my movements. I smiled slightly. I wanted to be worthy of
resurrection.

Then we went down into the dim red light of
the cellar.

“Here we go,” he whispered solemnly and the
sound built up unbearably. “Look!” he commanded and pressed
buttons.

Tensely I stared and stared at the dark
screen in the darkness.

Time went by.

Nothing came.

Nothing at all.

Hubris
.

I began to relax.

***

Six

We waited and waited that night and got
nothing. The next night we got a few shooting stars. Late-late-show
interference, he said and made Hanna switch off the TV. Outside of
that, framed darkness in darkness. Not even old darkness, he said
bitterly. So I didn’t see myself drinking white wine like blood and
trying to smile. I didn’t see the promised dead. He’d celebrated
too soon. I felt a certain childish satisfaction. And relief. He
wasn’t infallible after all.

I began to get bored with those long sessions
down in the cellar. All I got out of them were rheumatic twinges in
my right shoulder from the dankness. I asked Harvey why he didn’t
automatically videotape whatever might turn up on the screen. That
way we could stay upstairs in the nice warm living room, sitcomming
and dodging roaches. He said the images couldn’t be videotaped as
yet. Anyhow it was a secondary problem.

What had gone wrong? he wondered obsessively.
His calculations were watertight. The living room had been the
center of activity in the old days. It ought to be full of
recuperable images. He tried to figure it out. Literally figure it
out: pages and pages crawling with figures alongside his cot. He
suspected that uncontrolled random navigation lay at the root of
the problem. Could it be that the machine was ranging back too far,
before the house, before the shack, maybe hundreds or thousands of
years before the first white settlements? Pterodactyl time, maybe?
Naturally nothing would register at that distance. All of the
dynamos on earth couldn’t produce enough energy for that.

Harvey hardly emerged from the cellar at all
now except for the weekly hospital treatment and he balked
violently at that. Often he had to be forcibly extracted. It was
true that he never looked and sounded as bad as when he came back
from the hospital. The treatment took a lot out of him. It
partially paralyzed his brain, he claimed, almost as though they
knew what he was working on and wanted to sabotage it. He vomited
and couldn’t work properly for two days after. So he tried to stay
down in the cellar on the appointed day.

When he refused to respond to her barked
calls from the head of the cellar staircase, Hanna overcame her
fear of the machine. She came down, wheedling and menacing. He’d
tell her to leave him alone, they couldn’t do anything for him, she
should let him die. She’d yell that she wouldn’t let him die, you
just try to die on me, you old bastard.

Once he said he’d written the instructions
for his funeral in a lower left-hand drawer somewhere. Last wishes.
Incineration was the main thing. No burial. Fire. Did she hear?
Fire. Fuck you, she said. After, when she got the ashes, he
whispered, (fuck you, she said) a little ceremony could be held.
Only close friends: Jerry and her. White wine in the red goblets.
Music could be played. Jerry could choose between the Mozart
Requiem and “
I’ll be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal
You
.” Then his ashes
should be slowly strewn in the toilet-bowl and the chain solemnly
pulled. His ashes would wander a while in the sewer but eventually
emerge into sunlight in the open sea with the rest of the shit.
Then he wanted her to promise to get married. To marry his best and
only pal: Jerry Weizman. She’d be an heiress then.

Those clashes with Hanna, another kind of
treatment, put a little deceptive color in his face. At a certain
point she grabbed him. He put up a struggle. It was no joke now.
Had it been before? But what could he do against that brawn? I saw
her sweep him up in her arms, no strain at all. He didn’t weigh
much, that was true. He made squalling sounds in the place of
words. It was strange hearing her trying to soothe him, like a
cement mixer pouring out honey, calling him “sweetie” and “baby.”
Hanna carried him to the Volvo like a baby.

And between treatments he scribbled, vomited,
pondered and probed and found nothing at all. The screen remained
opaque.

A whole month dragged by.

In mid-December I got a call from Beth
Anderson. It had been a long time since I last heard her voice.
She’d seldom occupied my thoughts except under the shower when I
saw the greenish bruise on my left thigh from the impact of her
flowerbed.

She inquired about my health in a shy formal
voice, addressing me as “Professor Weizman.” She excused herself
for bothering me again but she was having trouble with her
television once more. Could I come over just a minute and have a
look? I’d be happy to, I lied, but objected that I knew nothing at
all about television except that it was bad. She said she felt sure
I could do something. She’d seen me lugging in coils of cable,
tubes, tools of all sorts and probably thought this was a sign of
technical competence.

The Chevy on the driveway had a new
windshield and windows. A few crumbs of safety glass glittered in
the gravel.

She was waiting at the open door, shivering a
little because of the cold, all done up with a silkish blue blouse
for her eyes and golden shoes, a new hair-do, blonder, with the
gray chemically muted. Her neat banality was repeated by her living
room.

“Oh, nice, nice,” I said, looking around. It
wasn’t a hundred percent spontaneous but I didn’t have to really
force myself to say it after three months of Hanna’s kitchen and
living room, Hanna herself and naturally Harvey. With that wig and
wasted face, that big-pored gigantic beak, he was less than
appetizing. Neither of them were fanatics about personal
daintiness. They didn’t smell too good at close or middle
range.

Beth Anderson of course (with that name)
smelled good, some kind of wholesome middle-western scent. Her
living room was faintly scented too: pinewoods from Air Wick. In
comparison to where I’d been a minute before, here all was luxury
and calm (this particular day). It was too much to expect
volupté
in the bargain.

Praise for her interior decoration
triggered the ritual: “Let me show you around.” To one side of the
picture window she had a miniature jungle of tropical plants in gay
enameled pots. She gave me the names and the blooming times. She
introduced her goldfish to me. He was called Oscar. “Jerry,” I said
to him. He swam up to the edge of his universe and goggled. “He
l
i
kes you!” she
exclaimed joyfully. “He doesn’t do that to everybody.” She showed
me a gilt rococo armchair with wormholes in the wood, faded red
velvet and greenish brass upholstery tacks. “It’s a family
heirloom, I don’t know how old. You’d better not sit on it, a big
man like you.”

She ushered me through an arch into a nook
done up in Mexican style. Terra-cotta sombreros decorated the pink
walls. The pattern of the sofa cover echoed the big potted cactus
with growths like spiked ping-pong paddles. Back in the living room
I stopped in front of a small fireplace. To one side of it stood a
wrought-iron holder containing shiny brass fire-utensils: a scoop,
tongs and a poker. There was also a pair of brass-studded
bellows.

She clicked a switch behind me. In their bed
of aluminum-dust ashes, birch-like logs began to glow. Ruddy
flame-lights started playing on the spotless bricks behind the
logs. She stood alongside me and made no effort to move. When the
flame-effect repeated its pattern for the third time I said:
“Cozy.”

“You should see it in the dark. It lights up
the whole room, nice and soft. Sometimes when I have the blues I
sit in the dark and just stare at it. It’s very calming.”

It wasn’t really necessary here but
automatically, as I did in any new house to situate the owner
culturally, I glanced at the bookcase. She and her husband were
radically separated on the shelves. It was like those two towels,
His and Hers, you used to find in this sort of house. Hers on the
top shelves: inspirational books, techniques of child-care and
guaranteed peace of mind, patchwork, Pope John Paul II, cookbooks,
gardening-books, best sellers. His on the bottom shelves with a
shelf of glass animals between them: spiritism, astrology,
numerology, parapsychology.

“I’ll bet you’re not bothered by insects
here,” I said as she showed me another predictable room. Coming
from where I did, this was supreme praise: “laudative
understatement” in the jargon of rhetoric.

“Mosquitoes sometimes.”

“No, I mean bugs, you know, roaches.”

“Roaches! I don’t think anybody in this
neighborhood has roaches. Except maybe … Do you have roaches over
there? I don’t mean you personally, of course.”

“Not more than a few hundred thousand.”

“How awful. Somehow I just can’t associate
you with roaches.”

I thought it was a lovely thing to say about
me, real laudative understatement. I pictured it engraved on my
tombstone. I didn’t insist on fire.

She showed me the impeccable iris-scented
bathrooms. “Now you know where they are,” she said. Sure enough,
there was a Her towel in one of them. He must have taken the His
with him. She didn’t overlook anything till the end of the tour.
Not a closet or cupboard went unopened. I saw her dresses, her
sheets and pillowcases, pink and blue with the stuffy fragrance of
lavender.

She even showed me her bedroom. There was a
big double bed with two pillows, for the sake of symmetry. The
pastel-blue walls were covered with framed black-and-white
photographs of her son from babyhood to adolescence. There were
maybe thirty of them. She was on lots of them with him. When he was
a baby and a little boy she’d been very pretty. His adolescence had
vampired her.