Time Travail (14 page)

Even as I was dialing the first number I
could hear in my mind the dialogue I was seconds away from. You
imagine something to make sure it won’t happen that way. It’s a
primitive vestige even in supposedly enlightened minds. Age? And to
the confession, a polite Uh-huh or a soothing Yess or maybe an
unenthusiastic I seee. Then: subject(s) taught? English? Frankly
sir if it were math or science no problem at all. But English.

And that’s almost exactly the way the
conversation ran. Maybe Harvey could pull things out of the past
but I possessed second sight, in a way time-travel to the future to
learn what he’d told me and I already knew: no future. So I didn’t
bother dialing the other two numbers. I went down to the cellar,
the long way around, avoiding the living room.

For a moment there I was afraid Harvey would
kiss me when I told him what I’d seen. He did have ideas about the
neighbor’s parasitic image. His first one was to send me back to
Beth Anderson’s to get all the technical particulars: find out
which make of TV, the exact model, the exact times of the
phenomenon, the exact orientation of the antenna, the channel.
Above all, the channel.

The information I brought back must have been
decisive. Five days later he invited me down into the cellar with a
triumphant look.

For nine hours we stared at the screen and
saw old objects in maniac magnification and pieces of people, most
of them dead and looking that way.

At about 3:00 am I got up and started
upstairs. He went on looking.

“Momma!” I heard him croak again as I pulled
myself out of the cellar.

I was too tired to go back after all the
senseless things I’d seen for so many hours. More senseless than
terrifying but sometimes that too if you were able to believe it
really was reactivation of time past and not a fraud.

***

Seven

You thought of a small child or a moron let
loose in that long-ago room with an old defective 8-millimeter
movie-camera running sporadically at the wrong speed with the wrong
lens and focus. Sometimes in the course of that night and also much
later I thought they actually were old film sequences he was trying
to palm off as stuff his machine was pulling out of the thin air of
time. Convincing another of the authenticity of the images allowed
him to convince himself, I reasoned. Madness works that way, I’d
read somewhere.

In those moments I extended my disbelief to
the radio voices of the earlier night too. I downgraded them to old
recordings. But then I’d remember the horror of random temporal
selection. Could he have faked that? I suppose he could have. I’d
let myself swing back into belief anyhow.

What bothered me sometimes was the rapidity
with which my disbelief crumbled. It was as though I wanted to
believe in the invisible persistence of time past as badly as he
did. Didn’t that make it something like shared insanity? At this
thought I’d swing back fearfully into disbelief.

In the dominant periods of belief, you were
tempted to attribute malevolence to the machine behind the
lead-plated wall. Childish anthropomorphizing. Simply, its mode of
operation was alien to our perception of spatial and temporal
reality. When it didn’t zoom into senseless close-ups it saw the
living room fish-eyed at an angle of 180 degrees. Everything was
shrunken and suffered distortion, radically at the edges.

And once your eyes compensated for all those
bent lines and crazy perspectives and you were about to try to
recognize tiny lost people, the image started fading. Fading away
from already faded into nothing at all. Depending upon how far back
the machine had gone the image lasted between one and forty
seconds. After a while you learned to judge the duration pretty
accurately from the start by the quality of the image. The more
flickering and feeble it was, the older it was and that much more
short-lived, stillborn almost. Could he have faked that?

Another troubling thing about the machine’s
performance was what Harvey called “random spatial selectivity.”
The human eye/brain couple privileges the human in a landscape. It
knows how to subordinate the non-essential. Harvey’s machine
subordinated nothing. Anything occupying space was treated as a
legitimate subject.

I remember that first revelation of the
machine’s pitiful capabilities. It turned out at the end of the
sequence that Harvey’s mother had been there in the living room all
the while, seated in a flowered armchair probably looking at a (TV)
screen herself.

What the machine gave in quick succession
was, I remember, the speckled pattern of the carpet renovated by
the return to the pre-Hanna years, the fold of a curtain, a
dragon’s head on a Chinese vase, a big oval mirror pivoted to a
wooden stand, ceiling-cornices, the fluted leg of a chair (I must
stop) an electrical outlet, certain keys of a piano I mustn’t
enumerate, the cross of window-panes, a dish of fruit on the table:
three mottled bananas, four apples, two oranges, a bunch of grapes,
how many grapes?

I could say but have to stop. What did I want
to say before those objects almost overpowered me? I think I wanted
to say that Harvey’s machine detailed the living (once living) and
the inanimate with impartiality. We got Harvey’s mother, and badly
fragmented at that, only in the last second before the sequence
faded. She was fragmented because Harvey’s machine decomposed
things and people (in a sense things alone since people were things
to it) in accordance to some strange logic.

It didn’t recognize the human face as a unit.
It didn’t even recognize the mouth as a unit. You’d get the lower
lip, the chin, the neck, part of the chest. That’s the fragment we
got of Harvey’s mother in the sequence I dangerously described. It
was just as well we didn’t get the eyes.

Sometimes the dictatorship of objects was
worse than that. You could be involved for hours with senseless
things before you got a fragment of a face, lost again after a
second or so. And you could be reasonably sure it was lost for good
unless you had a life span of a few hundred thousand years. That’s
another aspect of the machine’s mode of operation. I’ll try to
return to it if I remember and if I don’t get bogged down in things
as I almost did there again for the fourth time, I think: first the
junk-heap, then the Polack shantytown, then Rachel at Ebbet’s
Field, now this.

They are time-traps and they open up under
your feet when you least expect them to.

The thing is to react immediately, flounder
out of it at once, not let yourself get sucked under.

Sometimes movement in the living room would
distract the machine from its minute investigation of trivialities.
It would zoom in on the movement and then step back and track it.
It wasn’t the intrinsic importance of the person as a person or the
importance of what he was doing that motivated the machine’s choice
as I assumed at first. Movement in that room was generally human
but a sudden billowing of a summer curtain would polarize the
machine’s attention in the same way.

Once we saw the Morgensterns tiny and
distorted, fish-visioned, seated at the dinner table. Somebody
unknown to me tossed an orange across the wavy table to Harvey. The
lenses zoomed in on that orange, pitted like a Martian moon, held
it in suspension, time frozen, for two seconds and then zoomed in
on a fragment of the anonymous arm that had thrown it.

In addition to random spatial selection there
was random temporal selection. It could be terrifying.

One sequence I would like to forget started
with what must have been a Christmas dinner in fish-eye view with
maybe fifteen people gathered at the Morgenstern table. Before we
could pick out the participants, we got the usual zooming
inspections of the clawed feet of the sofa, the frame of the oval
mirror and its carved rosebuds, a curtain-tassel and other trivia.
Then came a series of close-ups on the Christmas tree. Five seconds
for tinsel. Then a macro close-up of a glass ball in which we could
see the dinner table in even worse distortion than usual. It wasn’t
like an arty film playing around with mirrored views of the
essential. The people about the table just happened to be there
reflected in the convex surface. The machine went from glass ball
to glass ball with maniac devotion.

Once Mrs Morgenstern with the jet-black hair
of her mid-forties was tracked in jerky movement, bearing a platter
with a turkey. Then the machine returned to its glass-ball
monomania. We were surprised at the length of the sequence. It
wasn’t the habitual maximum of forty seconds but three full
minutes.

Once again, movement interrupted the glass
ball investigation and the machine focused on Mrs Morgenstern
bearing in a platter of fruit.

She had shrunk. Her hair was pure white.

I have to believe that the machine had
plunged vertically, diachronically, detailing a long succession of
Christmas trees, spanning a quarter of a century in those three
minutes. Harvey deduced that later.

At the moment his suddenly white-haired
mother appeared on the screen he was incapable of analysis. The
image wrenched from him another “Momma!” This one came unusually
loud and cavernous, as from his bowels, bypassing his stricken
vocal cords.

What swam up on the screen that night
couldn’t have been trickery. It had to be authentic, time past
dredged up moldering in distortion and fragmentation. He couldn’t
have contrived that suffering on himself: not just the telescoping
of time but the way the supposedly resurrected people looked: that
paper whiteness of their faces, those circles of blackness in the
place of eyes, the wild jerking way they moved. They looked
dead.

***

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.