Time Travail (29 page)

He echoed me weakly but angrily.

Images? You never understood what it was all
about after all this time. You didn’t understand the blue mice, I
tried to explain it to you then.

His voice started going, reduced to a hoarse
whisper hard to follow.

They aren’t images. They’re alive. The way
they were back then. No, not the way. Not were. They are. Are alive
and it’s not just a question of looking, it’s a question …

At this point his voice went entirely and I
had only his lips to go by. What it was a question of doing was a
guess on my part. A question of enjoying them? It corresponded to
the lip-movements. But did it make sense? It wasn’t a question of
looking at them, it was a question of enjoying looking at them? The
promised opposition of clauses wasn’t present in the presumed
utterance.

Suddenly the remembered lip-movements
gave:

Joining.

It wasn’t a question of looking at them, it
was a question of joining them. There was formal rhetorical sense
in that, but insanity of meaning.

I don’t want to see them that way anymore, I
said. I won’t stay here another day. To hell with all the money you
owe me. And he shouldn’t think that if I left him I didn’t have a
place to go. I had a landing-point now, real, not virtual. I said
that I was sick of his dirty cracks about Beth Anderson. If he had
to talk about her it should be with respect.

He was instantly conciliatory. He thrust his
mouth against my ear. Just harmless little jokes, he whispered, not
understanding that my final outburst had been to cover up the other
thing. He returned to that other thing. If I wasn’t interested of
course I didn’t have to. He’d thought I did want to see her.

I turned again to the wall and said that no I
didn’t want to see her. It all came out and with it the beginning
of tears, like water astonishingly from a desert. I didn’t want to
see Rachel or my mother or father (dishonest with myself too, I now
realize, I again diluted her in the others) or anybody whose death
I’d painfully become reconciled to, whom time had eliminated from
the broad daylight thoroughfares of my mind.

He was still hovering over me, lips an inch
from my ear. He whispered, OK, of course I didn’t have to look if I
didn’t want to. All I had to do were the things that enabled him,
Harvey, to look. He said that I was surprisingly emotional for a
man my age. He said I should get up now, there was still time.

I refused to budge from my bed. They’d each
had their turn. It was mine now. Except they’d overslept. I was
sick.

You don’t sound very sick to me, he said. I
didn’t turn from the wall or answer him. He left.

I got up at what I thought was a safe ten and
took a walk through the weeds. Through the meshes of the fence I
saw that some of Beth’s tulips were coming up. Harvey approached
under his black umbrella. You don’t look very sick to me, he said.
I said, no, I was feeling a little better. Good, he said
triumphantly and got Hanna and told us that we’d start recording
right now, the hour didn’t matter, we wouldn’t put it off another
time. He was anxious to try out the storage-unit.

It was eleven in the morning when Hanna
parked the car, as instructed, in front of the old beauty parlor
lurking somewhere beneath a supermarket. She muscled the sensors
onto the pavement. They marked off an oblong of about three hundred
square feet. I was relieved at Harvey’s bad choice but couldn’t
help feeling sorry for him. His memory was really going. Didn’t he
remember that boy’s cut of hers that set off the whiteness of her
neck? Didn’t he remember it wasn’t the beauty parlor she went to
but the barbershop once a month along with him? He’d always had his
hair cut there at the same time she did. They’d done so many things
together.

At first I did my job conscientiously.
Basically I had to monitor and safeguard the sensors. The needle
had to remain within the narrow black zone. When it deviated
leftwards into the red I pressed the right-hand button, when
rightwards the left-hand one. At the same time I had to keep an eye
on the passersby. I ran around geometrically, shooing little kids
away from the sensors, protecting them from teenage roller-skaters,
apologizing to people who’d tripped over the cables that ran into
the Volvo. Painting them sidewalk-gray hadn’t been a good idea.
Once I even headed off a tapping blind man at the very last
moment.

Small throngs agglutinated about me. When the
onlookers made guesses (“Are you surveying?”) I could always get by
with a non-committal, “Something like that.” But when they expected
me to supply the explanation I would mutter something
incomprehensible or fantastic, things like “pavement tensile
resistance measurements.” Some of their guesses (like “laser
soundings of sewer-pipes”) were better than that and I used
them.

Finally I lost patience and said over and
over that it was a time machine. They grinned feebly and went on
watching.

Pretty soon I didn’t hear or see them
anymore. I was sensing almost to the point of vision the multitude
of the dead advancing toward me down the sidewalk. They were
massing on the verge of materialization, in broad daylight. It was
a new stage in the downward spiral of the cyclic sickness. Now
distance from the house didn’t count. Blue sky and the crowds of
the living weren’t antidotes anymore.

The thought didn’t come to me that the decay
and gloom of Harvey’s house were just B spook-movie properties,
that the machine was indifferent to atmosphere. It ground out the
time specters wherever they might be and continued to emit those
dangerous rays. My brain was just as vulnerable here in the outdoor
dead room created by the four sensors as in the indoor one. Tending
them at unprecedented close range I’d absorbed a massive dose of
the time rays. I turned to the double-parked Volvo. Maybe they were
coming through on Harvey’s screen. Maybe he was capturing them and
that somehow activated them for me.

I worked for a brutal end to it. I started
practicing passive sabotage. I stopped chasing the little kids away
from the sensors. I prayed they would tamper with them, break them,
that shoppers would stumble over them, smash the lenses. I even
looked up into the sky in the hope passersby would imitate me and
barge destructively into a sensor.

Sharp beeps summoned me to the Volvo. Hanna
took over surveying the sensors.

What the hell was the matter with me? Harvey
wanted know. What was I looking up at the clouds for? A kid had
nearly smashed a sensor. His sullen pouchy face under the golden
curls told me that it wasn’t working as he had hoped.

I got in the car and viewed what he’d taped.
The relay wasn’t doing a good job at this distance from the
master-machine in the cellar. The screen showed mainly blurred
feet, regiments of blurred feet. Who said they were even ancient
feet? Maybe they were no more than half an hour old. Once a dog
showed up clearly, motionless. A second dog came and sniffed and
humped the first dog. A recent or an authentically ancient hump?
Who could tell? The operation in man and beast was timeless.

Then I saw that he had pulled in really old
things on his screen, too old to be dangerous. Male ghosts in
straw-hats and female ghosts with feathered felt hats and
ankle-long skirts jerked by. The machine was back to random
temporal selection.

Suddenly Miss Forster filled the entire
screen ghostly, smiling for some reason. She was much younger than
when I’d had her as my teacher at eight in PS 89 and she was badly
blurred but it could be no one else with that slight hunch and
broken front tooth. She blurred further into mist and the mist
vanished. The screen remained empty.

Finally it must have come back to him, the
site of her long-ago haircut, because he asked me where the
barbershop was. He couldn’t find it anywhere on my map. I told him
I wasn’t sure but thought it might be somewhere in the space
occupied by the Ford showcase.

He had Hanna move the sensors fifty yards
further in front of the showcase. She swore. Sweat was pouring down
her face. She had to double-park in front of Ford. I was still in
the car.

An image swam up gray and warped. His relay
wasn’t doing a great job. The barbershop was a blur. Figures went
past it. No customers went in or out of the blur. Then the lenses
slowly focused and in fear I almost expected to see myself looking
eyeless through the lettered window at her eyeless in the
mirror.

But the blur slowly resolved not into the
barbershop but a funeral-parlor.

For a while we sat there in silence. Then
Harvey had Hanna move the sensors in front of the brand-new bank
where the butcher’s had been. I got out of the car and resumed my
monitoring duties in deep fear.

It all came to an end this way.

A police-car sneaked up. There were two of
them inside and they stayed there for a while, scrutinizing. I
could feel their stares in my back. They pulled me back into the
present, brutally. It was a relief to have to cope with reasonable
fear. I’ve always been scared of cops. In my younger days I’d had
legitimate reasons.

Finally the older bulkier cop extracted
himself and plodded over to one of the sensors. He stared at it
from all angles. Then he moved over to the second one and repeated
the operation. Then the third one. Finally he came over to
mine.

“Good morning, Officer,” I said
cheerfully.

He didn’t answer. He squatted and scrutinized
the fourth sensor. The funny thing was, his hand never left the
immediate vicinity of his holster. It wasn’t really funny.

I think he was maybe the dumbest cop I’d ever
encountered. He had to practically trip over it before he noticed
the gray sidewalk-color cable snaking out of the sensor. He hadn’t
seen the three others. He stared at it, followed it and found
himself before the back door of the Volvo. I could imagine that he
saw Hanna snoring away on one part of the back seat, Harvey on the
other, absorbed in contemplating on the screen whatever the sensors
were pulling in from Schulz’s butcher shop forty years before.

The cop turned about and marched up to me
again. His hand, making no bones about it, was on the revolver
butt. It made me nervous.

“What the hell’s this all about?”

“Seismic detectors, Officer,” I said
promptly.

“Yeah?”

“Four, as you can see. For the echo
effect.”

He stared at me for what must have been a
minute.

“A what kind of detector?”

“An earthquake detector. Tremors,
actually.”

He stared at me bleakly then returned to the
police-car and started talking to the other cop. Their eyes never
left me. Finally the younger, thinner cop got out of the car and
came up to me. He stared down at the sensor at my feet.

“This is supposed to be a seismograph? And
the other three too? All four of them?”

“Absolutely, Officer.”

“To detect tremors.”

“What else?”

“Quake-detectors. Good thing for you they’re
not lie detectors. Come on, what are you trying to hand me? New
York’s not in the volcanic zone. Not in the subduction zone either.
No mid-plate quakes here. Solid bedrock. Everybody knows that. What
are you trying to pull?”

He looked faintly Jewish. What was he doing
on the police force?

“Look, Officer, I’m doing this for a friend.
He has a thing about earthquakes. He once got caught in one. I know
it’s not a subduction zone here and you know it’s not but he’s a
very nervous man.”

“How come you’re doing it here? You got a
permit to operate on a public sidewalk?”

“It’s like, I don’t know, bird-watching. Some
things have to be done out of doors. That’s where earthquakes
happen. I didn’t know you needed a permit.”

“In front of a bank it has to be done?”

Sure enough. It was getting dangerous now.
I’d been seeing Schultz’s butcher-shop there, his great nazi fist
with the cleaver cleaving muscle and bone. I’d forgotten that in
the present occupation layer it was a bank. The bank people must
have phoned.

“That your friend in the old
station-wagon?”

I nodded. The cop made me accompany him to
the car. He tugged up his blue trousers a little, flexed his knees
slightly and peered inside.

“Oh for Christ’s sake. I should have guessed.
Who else? We meet again, Mr Morgenstern. We got two more complaints
yesterday. Something’s going to have to be done. Aren’t a dozen
fines enough? Anyhow you’re getting a ticket for double-parking.
OK, I want you to clear the sidewalk of all that junk and
fast.”

The two cops stood there as Hanna and I
grappled with the evicted sensors, still and blind now, just dead
weight. When we finished I found myself nervously saying, “Goodbye,
Officers,” and also, “Thank you” to each of them. They didn’t
answer. They stood there, a great blue intensely real presence and
behind them what they guarded, equally intense and real: the bank,
the supermarket, the video-shop, the Ford showcase.

That’s how the attempted resurrection of Old
Forest Hill and certain of its deceased inhabitants came to an end.
Not even the time-storage unit had worked properly it turned out
later. All it had retained was the humping dogs and ten seconds of
Miss Forster’s marred smile.

Harvey spent the rest of the day on his back
on the sofa in the dead room staring at the apparent emptiness. He
didn’t eat or say a word.

That evening I went over to Beth’s. She had
the same intense reality as the two cops. I practically forced her
out of the bedroom, away from the ticking alarm clock, the cama de
matrimonio haunted by her husband and her son staring down at us. I
overcame her resistance at the threshold of the brand-new room with
the brand-new cot.