Time Travail (41 page)

Is this the moment and place that he takes
off the blue denim jacket?

He starts climbing up. His heart isn’t equal
to the task, not with moldering rungs below that break under his
weight, that slip out of his grasp above and the dangerous buckle
as he rises through dead bindweed toward the open red window like a
lover or a fireman, not a fireman though, forty years too late for
that, and the one-way lover hadn’t needed a ladder, the key is
under the mat as Mrs Morgenstern said it would be and he gets it
and inserts it and lets himself in, steals across the living room
to the stairs and up the stairs to that room at the end of the
corridor and at that point, taking him out of it, cars brake
violently in front of the house, voices, the slamming of the car
doors.

The blue principle of reality to his rescue a
second time. Any moment now the police will break inside. This
time, however dumb, they’re sure to see the four cables
immediately. They’ll follow the cables up the stairs, down the
corridor, through the door and break into what’s going on inside
the helmet.

JW’s foot gropes for missing rungs to descend
from his compromising posture. With the shift of his weight the
ladder at that acute angle buckles away from the house, teeters
unsupported for a second and then clatters violently back against
the wall, almost wrenching him loose.

The voices are close now, girls’ voices too.
He opens his eyes and over his shoulder looks down at them in the
moonlight looking up at him: Ricky, his chunky Hispano pal, two
other rocker types, four busty girls with violet lips and nails,
black in the moonlight.

The girls start making savage lynch-mob
noises. Now they’re all milling at the foot of the ladder. They
start shaking it violently. No question of making the universal
gesture of surrender, hands in the air. His white-knuckled hands
can only strangle the wood for survival.

He tries to explain that he’s Mrs Anderson’s
neighbor, but can only cry it spasmodically to the wall because
he’s hugging the bucking frame and anyhow they can’t hear him with
the noise they’re making.

With the window open can’t Harvey hear the
noise? Or is he encapsulated forty years back, already in the other
room where there can be no noise, not even of weeping? That’s a
fleeting thought, skimming over the slow sands, so no time-trap
because JW is at grips with an intensely real present. He should be
grateful for the imminence of cardiac arrest or a smashed spinal
column.

“Come on down, you mother,” one of them
yells.

Unable to turn around, JW cries to the wall,
choppily: “Please stop. Shaking. The ladder. I have a. Bad heart.
Condition. Let me. Get down. And explain.”

A rocker starts up the ladder. JW tries to
clamber up higher, away from that murderous face. The other lunges
up, grabs at his foot. All he gets is JW’s empty shoe. Off balance,
he topples off the ladder with the shoe in his hand down onto the
others. Taking advantage of the confusion below and the end of the
shaking, JW starts letting himself down, crying, “Neighbor!
Neighbor!” Ricky pushes the others back. JW collapses on the grass,
clutching his chest.

When he opens his eyes Ricky’s spaced-out
white face, inches away, is staring down at him. At a higher level
a circle of hostile spaced-out faces look down at him. A foot above
his face a hand is holding his shoe.

JW gasps again, “Neighbor!” Gasps it over and
over. After a while his heart allows him to elaborate the concept.
Does it the wrong way. Doesn’t say plausibly: had heard noise from
the house, seen suspicious red light, had climbed up the ladder to
have a look. Conditioned reflex by now for him to state function
after identity.

So he says: “I’m the neighbor. I water Mrs
Anderson’s plants.”

The girls jeer. Before he can rectify their
image of him climbing up a ladder at 2:00 am with a watering can,
one of the rockers shouts, “Never mind the old bastard. The front
door, for crissakes!”

They rush that way. The old bastard too,
yanked to his feet by the chunky Hispano type who helped steal his
precious audio system and who is now twisting his arm painfully
behind his back. The gang fills the doorway and begins pushing with
their shoulders. The door bursts open with a sound of irreparable
breakage inside and they crowd into the red gloom of the living
room crunching underfoot the debris of the gilt rococo chair. The
second, illicit, passage of the cables has swept protecting
newspapers away and the broad swathe of carpet is full of dirt.
Also her cherry-wood side-table is overturned and her flowered vase
smashed. The cables pour up the staircase and beyond.

The chunky Hispano releases his hold and JW
collapses on the sofa. He sees them as from a great distance massed
at the foot of the staircase, daunted by Hanna midway up the
flight. Amazon defending a Thracian mountain pass. Her mean pig
eyes glare through wilding hair. She viciously jabs Beth Anderson’s
decorative poker down at them. Nobody dares take her on.

O brave hophead hoplites, lynching a drunk
heart-sick old man with his back turned and his defenseless hands
clutching unsteady wood for survival, no hesitation then: pitch him
into myocardial infarction or quadriplegia. Do something now, for
Christ’s sake. Baffle her back like a lion with the four legs of a
chair, a kitchen chair, not one of these elegant ones here. Rush
her, overpower her, follow the four black and now green guides down
the corridor and into the room, rip wires, unplug him, evict the
time-voyeurger.

Stalemate. The two sides don’t move, just eye
each other. Then JW hears someone say, “The ladder.” Ricky
disappears through the front door. Time goes by. Anxious for
diversion, JW thinks: the side-table can be righted, the
mass-produced vase replaced, the carpet vacuum-cleaned. But the
heirloom?

Sudden dramatic turn of events. Stalemate
broken. Harvey and Ricky appear at the head of the stairs. Isn’t
that a wreath of dead bindweed in Ricky’s hair? Truce. Ricky is
supporting Harvey, like a pal. Alliance now?

Ricky makes a sign to his friends not to
move. Hanna backs up the stairs, still gripping the poker and
keeping her eyes on the gang. She nearly trips over one of the
cables. Harvey talks to her. She doesn’t look happy at what he
says. She goes down the stairs to the door. Going out with the
poker still in her hand her foot crunches a big fragment of the
heirloom.

In a few minutes she’s back with an envelope.
All three of them disappear down the corridor. The gang relaxes.
They start smoking various things. JW hasn’t got the energy to get
up and hand saucers around. Anyhow he senses that the fire-hazard
worry is another diversion. From what? His heart? Or is that a
diversion too?

Soon Ricky appears. Looks satisfied. Going
down the stairs with the envelope in his hand he says, “Bingo!”
Squeezes past Hanna. She still has the poker in her hand. Slam it
bent double over his head, ram it up his venal rectum. She tosses
the poker onto the carpet below.

Ricky directs his friends to drag the
furniture into a barrier (be gentle with it, gentle, gentle,
implores JW in thought) and now the living room is separated in
two, on one side the gang, on the other side the cables and JW on
his sofa. Peaceful partition of conquered territory.

JW retreats as far away from it all as
possible. He and his bottle go into the Mexican nook with the big
cactus and the terra-cotta sombreros. He takes a swig and lies down
on the cactus-patterned sofa. He closes his eyes. He hears his
heart, the persistent rustle of newspapers, the tinkle of glasses,
raucous bursts of laughter, now loud rock music and above all that
– how is it possible? – hears the buzzing and whirring of the four
lenses upstairs. A party’s under way. He ought to get up and survey
things. Tired. In a second he’ll do that, just a few seconds. So
tired.

The ladder bucks wildly but he can’t hold on
with the key in one hand the watering can in the other, can’t reach
that inflamed open window with rungs breaking under him. He tries
to tell the yelling lynch mob below that it’s not real fire but the
electric fireplace, fictional fire that can’t burn, he’ll put it
out anyhow. He tries to rise to the window. Ultimate rungs break.
He pitches down into the lynch mob and their knives and spades and
saws. They have familiar faces from way back but pitiless.
Surviving them he’s on a beach looking for something precious lost
in the sands. It must be found before night. It’s a deadline. The
sky fills with darkness.

Maybe it’s another dream that he opens his
eyes onto a face suspended white above him, staring down. What he
should say to the bloodless face is: “Get out, all of you. Your
mother left me with the key to the house. I’m responsible for what
happens here. It’s delegated authority. So you and your gang get
the hell out of here.” Or he should say: “Stop those machines up
there. It’s not worth the money in that envelope, we’re all being
radiated into incurable sickness. I delegate delegated authority
for you to go back upstairs and shut the machines off and chase him
out of this house or whatever house it is.”

Instead JW finds himself saying: “You stole
my hi-fi. I want it back.” What he should urgently say now is:
“Drive me to the hospital. I’m not well. I think I’m dying.”
Instead, he says, “And the records too. All of them.”

Could the other have said outside a dream
what he says in his curious high-pitched fragile voice? “I know
you. You’re the old bastard who screwed my mother before I made her
kick you out of our house. Get out of here.”

Whichever world he’s in JW is deeply shocked
at that and replies: “You don’t know me at all but I know you,
everything, inside and out.”

And proves it with testifying forefinger
pointed up at the white wincing face by reciting everything he
knows about him, from earliest childhood, his favorite ice cream
flavors, the names of his early friends, sledding in Forest Park
with his mother, precocious masturbation, once ran a fever of 105
and his mother lit candles for him in the church, his favorite
toys, comic-books, movies, how he nearly drowned in a river, and
his mother nearly died at that, the length of his appendicitis
scar, recites three of his worst poems, tells how his mother rolled
on the floor when she saw the dead girl in the room, how he’d
vampired her out of a decade in a year, how he smashed his mother’s
car and kicked her, kicked his loving mother, exploited her,
drained her of money and beauty.

Where else than in a dream could the other
have protested in a high weepy voice: Get out of my head. I never
kicked my mother. I love my mother. I love Beth. Get out of my
head. You’re in the Golden Galaxy too. You’re a Supreme in the
Golden Galaxy.

He wants to talk about the Golden Galaxy but
JW is back on the deadlined beach searching hard in the growing
darkness. You can dream in a dream. From the seaward side of a dune
he hears a scream, ohhh! and his name.

JW opens his eyes on painful daylight.
Doesn’t know where he is but when he hears the scream again (not
“ohhh!” but denial: “nohhh”) sits bolt upright, blinking. Silence
now. He staggers out of the Mexican nook.

Beth Anderson is sitting among the fragments
of the rococo armchair near the open living room door. Still
gripping the straps of her flight bag, she’s swaying to and fro.
Her deathly white face is ecstatic with The Golden Galaxy technique
to deny the painful reality of unpotted (but faithfully watered)
hydrangeas, the smashed goldfish bowl with Oscar stiff in the
shards, the butts and burned spoons and shooters on the carpet, the
slumped and curled up bodies of the kids out for the count, the
overturned table, the furniture-barricade, the broken vase, the
dirt, the cables, the four black cables pouring up the
staircase.

Her lips move soundlessly. Is it a prayer for
belief and maybe the lucky cosmic number, bingo, one billion and
something and this veil of chaos will vanish? JW feels like joining
her in prayer.

At this point a thud comes from upstairs and
then a raw animal bellow. She tries to ignore it but when the
inhuman bellow comes again her eyes open on JW where he stands with
his missing shoe, gripping the empty bottle of Glenfiddich.

Her wet blue eyes widen and widen. Then she
squeezes them shut again and tries to struggle back into
denial.

But Hanna thumps down the stairs with an
earthquaking face, bearing Harvey, and she has to open her eyes
again as Hanna jolts past her toward the door with Harvey’s bald
head lolling over the crook of her arm, his mouth open, eyes white,
a great red welt on his forehead.

Beth starts screaming again. She screams:
Police! Police!

The kids who slumbered like rocks through the
first screams and the bellows resurrect at the word “police”, grab
their clothes and stuff and vanish in super-accelerated fast
motion.

Beth and JW are alone in the shambles.
They’re both looking around. She’s looking around for something in
the room. He’s looking around for something to say. He doesn’t know
what to say. Anyhow words are no good at this moment. What is she
looking around for?

JW thinks of something better than words. He
gropes for his inside breast pocket theoretically located at heart
level. That gesture, desperate now, must resemble his earlier
heart-clutching gestures last night.

He discovers he’s not wearing the blue denim
jacket. So there can’t be an inside breast pocket and so no wallet
and so no $84,000.30 check that he wants to give her to remove that
expression from her face.

If he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, she
does. She bends down and picks up the decorative poker Hanna tossed
away. Less in fear of the poker than of her eyes JW backs up
through the door, turns, and, loping like Lenny, leaves that house
forever.