Time Travail (15 page)

But I knew what the sensors were there for if
she didn’t. I left the living room (I began thinking of it as the
dead room) to its earlier inhabitants, the co-dwellers. I’d seen
them there on his screen. So they were there in the dead room and
forever. They were impotent but invincible. The earth could explode
but they’d go on occupying that space, forever.

Not just that space. Soon I sensed them
contaminating the other rooms of the house. I tried to combat the
idea that in whatever room I went I shouldered invisible
multitudes, that there wasn’t a square inch of unoccupied space,
that with every step I was increasing their number, depositing
hundreds of moments of myself behind me as on a stroboscopic photo.
It was suffocating. When you thought of it, as you couldn’t help
doing more and more often, you wished you could dwell on the
ceiling like a fly. But then you realized that the ceiling itself
must be virtually black with untold generations of flies.
Illogically (hadn’t they been unbearably peopled too?) I longed for
empty beaches sloping into the immensity of the sea. Again the Van
Gogh posters helped a little.

By this time (the second week of ghouling) an
incident occurred that I interpreted as a possible explanation for
what was happening to me. The incident was connected with Harvey’s
pathological secrecy. He’d said over and over that I should never
go down in the cellar when he wasn’t there. He hid his calculations
from me, flatteringly, as though I could make sense of the symbols
and figures.

That day I went down the stairs and surprised
him coming out of the lead-plated room where the master machine
was. He’d switched the light off inside. All I could dimly see
behind him in the upright rectangle of blackness was the end of a
shelf and on it a notebook.

He caught my curious gaze. Snapping the big
brass combination lock shut and scrambling the code, he said:

“I wouldn’t advise poking around. Inside
here. Unless you want to get. What I got. That’s why there’s lead.
On the wall and the door. I found out about the machine. Too late.
Like Curie. Unlucky Pierre.”

I wondered at first if it wasn’t an invention
of his to scare me away from what lay behind that gray door. Then I
wondered if it mightn’t be true.

Maybe I’d been exposed to radiation myself
despite the lead armor. I imagined the time-rays seeping past the
lead-molecules. It was a frightening thought. Less so, though, than
incipient insanity. Unless the two explanations weren’t mutually
exclusive.

There was a fundamental question I evaded
then. At the first symptoms of the sickness and assuming the
machine down in the cellar was the source of it why didn’t I pack
up and flee, never mind all the money he owed me? Flee the dust and
disorder, outer and inner, the croaking voice, the roaches, those
shadows waylaying you at every turn of the corridors?

Maybe it was because for the moment those
symptoms were limited to the space of the house. As soon as I
stepped outside into the suburban banality of manicured lawns and
backyard barbecues the symptoms weakened. I felt almost normal a
mile from the house, jogging. I tried to reason that it couldn’t be
in my blood or brain. Infection and craziness you transport with
you wherever you go.

That was the superficial reason I stayed on.
I think I know the deep reason now.

But most of the time I was inside the house.
I started developing strange ideas. One day Hanna tripped over my
pail of warm sudsy water in the corridor outside the dead room. She
upset it but stubbed her toe, a consolation. She hopped furiously
on one foot holding the other. She swore at me. I swore back
because of the mess. I told her that it was her job anyhow not
mine. I was on my hands and knees with the scrubbing-brush.

I told her I couldn’t stand the filth anymore
but it wasn’t that. I’d got the idea that the dust and cobwebs were
a favorable milieu for them like dankness for toadstools. It didn’t
change things but I felt better while I was doing it until I
imagined Mrs Morgenstern eyeless in her red bandanna alongside me
scrubbing away too.

Powerfully imagined her and the others in
those rooms and passages. But no more than that, I tried to
reassure myself. I didn’t actually see them off the screen, in the
contemporary living room. I hadn’t reached Harvey’s stage yet. When
he wasn’t down in the cellar you were sure to find him in that
whirring room Hanna and I steered clear of. It was as though he
wanted to inhabit the same space as his mother. You could
understand his fixation on the past. There wasn’t much for him in
the present or in the future which he said didn’t exist.

I guess there was nothing for him in sanity
either. I’d stand on the threshold I didn’t dare cross and watch
Harvey in that room. I noted how he made skirting movements in the
middle of carpeted emptiness and realized that he was avoiding the
long-vanished piano. Or he would bump into furniture that was
occupying former emptiness. Sometimes he’d talk to the ghosts. In
his mind they must have replied because once I heard him wheezing
with laughter.

Finally Hanna would venture to the threshold
of that room, not scared, like me, of the ghosts she didn’t
suspect, but scared of the ceaseless glass eyes. She’d see what he
was doing and say: “Harv! Cut it out. You come on out back here.”
Repeated it over and over. Usually if she nagged him long enough
he’d painfully come out of it.

Once he put up as fierce a struggle as down
in the cellar. It was time for his hospital treatment. He ignored
her and went on with his half-smiling dialogue. Finally she glanced
in fear at the sensors and entered the dead room heroically. She
grabbed him by the arm. He looked away from his interlocutor,
squinted at her for a second and then returned to the interlocutor
with a word maybe of apology for the dim interruption. He tried to
recover his arm gripped in her ham.

“You touch me. You bitch and. Jerry gets half
of. Schering Plough.”

“Stick all of Schering Plough up your ass.”
She dragged him toward the sad, sane side of the threshold.

“I don’t want any of it,” I said in a loud
intractable voice to overrule my secret reaction to his words. He’d
recalled the promise of the eventual 25% of all of the shares and
the bonds and the money-market fund, a promise he’d made in the
middle of the night of the old voices. Ever since, without really
believing in it, I hadn’t been able to avoid thinking of that
$200,000 after taxes, shamefully each time (because of what it
necessarily involved), but quite often.

Maybe that was why I put up with as much as I
did. Everything except, finally, the ghouling sessions when one day
he said that he was hoping to bring back my mother, a frequent
visitor to that living room.

I told him I didn’t want him ever to do that.
He shouldn’t ever disturb my mother. I told him I wasn’t going down
in the cellar any more, never again. I’d decided not to ghoul
anymore.

My term for it offended him. That sidetracked
the issue. I reminded him what they looked like. He yelled at me
faintly. How could they look dead when in fact they were alive? I
should have my eyes examined. I didn’t tell him I already had.
Apparently we didn’t see the same things on the screen. Maybe
rectification of the deformed images was instantaneous and
permanent with him, not just five seconds. Didn’t that mean
instantaneous and persistent joy? He conceded a certain distortion
and flicker but claimed you could see their eyes.

I stuck by my refusal. Finally we
compromised. I would be released from viewing but had to take my
memory-boosting duties seriously. I should do it in writing.

Two weeks after the first mutilated images
swam up on his screen Harvey handed me questionnaires on people I’d
known in the old burned-down house. He expected me to recall scenes
involving them and to situate them roughly in time and space.
“Navigational assistance” he called it again.

There were a couple of blank pages to be
filled out on classmates, on his grandparents, on my mother. There
were about twenty blank pages to be filled out on his own mother.
Just a page for his father. He’d never liked his father.

There were four questions on Rachel Rosen.
First, he wanted a detailed physical description if I still refused
to let him have a photo of her. Second, a detailed account of our
various encounters, in particular the first and last encounters,
with the exact time and date and place. Third, a detailed
description of her room with the estimated location of the room
with regard to the later Anderson house. The fourth question
encompassed the three others. I was to describe in detail anything
else I remembered concerning the subject.

All that paper allotted to Rachel Rosen –
there must have been five hundred sheets in all – seemed to dictate
an in-depth treatment. Those blank sheets were like histological
sections of the memory-blasted parts of his brain. I was supposed
to inscribe things on them. I felt like scribbling after each
question, “I can’t remember.” But those three words would have
created a terrific imbalance with the five hundred starved
expectant sheets. He’d be sure to take it for deliberate
withholding. Wouldn’t that mean midnight descent to the cellar and
resumption of ghouling? Resumption of exposure to infection? I sat
at my desk and stared down at the piles. Finally I reached for the
first sheet.

I spent most of the next five days in my
room. No time for jogging, the chinning-bar or music. Sometimes
things came back in the middle of the night. I’d get up and commit
them to paper. It was less for the sake of his brain than for mine.
I didn’t want the slightest snared memory to slip away again. I saw
them as timid creatures emerging out of a dark forest. They gave me
great pleasure. Sometimes it peaked to joy. And I was being paid
for it. Only the need for food drove me out of that room.

And when I sneaked down into the kitchen for
one of Hanna’s cold specials I made another discovery. I was hardly
bothered at all by the former dwellers of the space I passed
through. As for the jerking dead, they’d totally vanished. I
determined never to set foot in the cellar again. It was the source
of the infection.

Harvey came up quite often and talked to me
through the door. I’d locked it. I didn’t want to be disturbed, I
told him. How is it coming? he’d ask. Coming along fine, I’d reply.
You remember lots of things? he’d ask. I always replied: more and
more. Can I have it now? he always asked. It sounded like a plea
for an urgently needed blood transfusion. Don’t disturb me, I’d
reply. You’re driving it away. It was true. At that he’d leave very
quietly.

Finally on the sixth day he came in. I’d
forgotten to lock the door. I was propped up in bed, scribbling
away. It must have been noon. There was no point getting up early.
I remembered just as well in bed. I’d dragged the desk over to the
bedside. He looked down at the big pile alongside me. He took a
sheet, stared at it, then took another sheet and finally the whole
pile. He leafed through it faster and faster.

“What the hell? Stamps?”

“It started out with Fatty Berkowitz then it
got onto the stamps. You remember, Saturday afternoons, the trading
sessions? If you don’t remember, read this and it’ll all come
back.”

“Who gives a shit? About stamps? Or about
Allan Berkowitz?”

“Henry Berkowitz was one of the people you
wanted to know about.”

Two pages were enough, for Christ’s sake, he
said. Who needed more than two pages on him? I’d done a hundred.
And not even on Fatty Berkowitz. On stamps. He looked at the Rachel
Rosen pile and of course saw that it had diminished. He wanted what
I’d done on her, he said.

But I hadn’t done anything on her yet. He
hadn’t spoken of priority so I’d concentrated on one of the
classmates, fat freckled stammering Henry Berkowitz and the three
fabulous stamp-albums he used to lug over to Harvey’s on Saturday
afternoons a million years ago. They were trading-sessions. I’d
recalled my cigar-box and inside the gummed hinges and their sweet
fishy taste, the tongs, the rectangular magnifying glass. I’d
recalled Scott’s fat red catalog. It illustrated and priced
impossible longed-for things. There were those rare inversions and
tête-bêches (in all innocence), the fabulous 1856 British Guyana
One-Cent Magenta valued at $50,000 then, the 1840 Penny Black with
young Victoria in strange left-facing profile as if unwilling to
view her future black dowager dumpiness. I saw my album with the
map of the world and the intact British and French empires in pink
and violet.

Guard down, I can recall all those things in
detail. Can wander about peacefully visiting them like museum
displays. No chance of a trap springing for the time of the stamps
and the other things associated with it like twilighting
stick-ball, rainy day Monopoly, Red Rover Red Rover let Jerry come
over, candles in papier-mâché pumpkins, etc. No chance of being
caught back there.

Anyhow, I was a subsidized memorialist now.
I’d written tirelessly. It wasn’t all dry enumeration. It had
narrational interest, comic episodes even. I’d reminded him of the
stamps we used to swipe from Henry, how we’d also conned the fat
heavy-tongued kid with stamps given ancient-looking fade in a
Chlorax bath, clean-shaven monarchs bearded with indelible ink,
figures modified to promote them out of the usual Scott 2-cent
valuation. Harvey took care of the technical side and I delivered
the glib sell. Henry’s incredible gullibility at all that remained
comedy until one morning in bed at about eleven, almost half a
century after the event, the idea occurred to me that Henry had
known but had no friends and was prepared to pay that price for
those Saturday afternoons.