Time Travail (42 page)

***

Twenty One

So here he is after all that, back at
starting point, the dried-blood gloom of Harvey Morgenstern’s
cellar. Seated with a runny nose at the console, he stares at the
screen as he’s been doing for so long, but this time viewing
nothing better than his own face under that recycled permanent-wave
helmet. Like a madman in some country, or a criminal in his own, or
a universal dunce. All three at the same time?

His face twitches at him. He twitches back.
He realizes he’s just about reached the tether-end of recall and
stall. Any moment now he’ll have to go. But where? Via the
staircase, up and out and forward? Via the red dispatching button,
down and in and back (but maybe black)?

Theoretically, recall and stall could go on a
little longer. Between flight from Beth Anderson’s shambled living
room and his present underground position there’d be lots of things
to chronicle if the chronicler were in better shape to do the job.
Those things are a scramble in his mind except sometimes a little
better during spells of lucidity. Which means much worse in another
way. Luckily, the spells are less and less frequent. This one, he
feels sure, is the last he’ll suffer and he’s on the verge of
snapping out of it. He knows the symptoms by now. Lucidity goes as
suddenly as it comes.

But even lucid, chronology’s shot to hell.
Everything’s random selection. And the scenes he does manage to
salvage are blurred like Harvey’s early images. They’re too close
up in time. It’s like presbyopia, a sight defect that worsens with
age: far things sharp but can’t focus on near things. JW can see
things fifty years back very clearly, the engraving whorls on a
50-centime French stamp or the double-toothed grin of a pumpkin
with a candle inside, but not the things that followed eviction
from the other house.

It’s a symptom of the worsening time
sickness, he often thinks. Or maybe the side-effects of
amplification.

Logically, one of the first things must be
the visit to the hospital. Lying there unconscious, white as the
walls, radiating wires and tubes and surrounded by dials, Harvey
doesn’t look much different here than down in the cellar. Is he
still voyaging? The visitor can see the red welt on his forehead,
fainter now. He asks about it. He expects the doctor to confirm
electrocution. The doctor doesn’t understand what he’s talking
about. Harvey is suffering from heart collapse, he says, not
unusual in the terminal stage.

He dies that night. Harvey betrayed him but
JW feels sorry. He doesn’t go to the burning ceremony though. Did
Hanna get the ashes along with everything else? Each time he
flushes the toilet JW thinks of Harvey and his last wish. Although
it wasn’t his idea, JW’s ashamed of the thought, almost to the
point of constipation.

JW still feels sorry even when he finds out
(months later that must be) that Hanna inherited everything, even
the Schering Plough shares Harvey had practically promised him with
no protest on her part. She’d even said Harvey could stick them up
his ass. But JW doesn’t get a single Schering Plough share, not
even that way. He doesn’t cry over it. Sometimes he laughs and
laughs at the idea of harboring a ploughshare that way.

The will doesn’t matter much to him by then,
not even when it turns out that there’s no mysterious account in
his name with back pay. So he gets nothing. Practically nothing. A
clause stipulates that the “experimental devices” in the cellar are
his and that he can continue living in the house until his death
when full property of the house will revert to Hanna or her
estate.

That was nice of Harvey. Unless it was
posthumous revenge, JW occasionally thinks during bad moments with
the machine.

He can’t recall if this is before or after
the hospital visit but he remembers getting up before dawn and
sneaking over to her house. She must have got someone to clear out
that room. All of Harvey’s stuff is there piled up alongside the
ash-can near the street lamp. The salvaged tinkered objects have
accomplished their mortal cycle from garbage back to garbage, ashes
to ashes. There are the four cables, mutilated now. She must have
hacked them off at the holes in the fence where they trespassed on
her property. There’s the portable switchboard, the relay, the
portable monitor, the time-cassettes, the permanent wave helmet
that killed him (he’s convinced of this no matter what the doctor
said or will say). There’s even a cardboard box full of red bulbs.
Also his fedora.

JW steps over her friendly symbolic white
wood fence. Her Chevy isn’t there and the windows of the house are
in white mourning with drawn curtains and drapes. He guesses she’s
gone to her sister’s for real now. Still, he looks up nervously at
her bedroom window when the driveway gravel crunches underfoot. He
leaves her keys under the mat and goes behind the house.

It’s dark but he can make out the ladder,
still propped up under the opaque window. That’s a good sign. Maybe
nobody’s been here since the lynching episode. But as the sky
lightens slowly he sees that there’s no blue denim jacket anywhere.
Couldn’t the wallet have slipped out of the breast pocket? He looks
and looks. He finds his damp left shoe under a lilac bush.

He starts lugging all of Harvey’s stuff into
the house, to punish his heart he tells himself. At the end he’s
dizzy and sweating but his heart goes on beating and beating. It
doesn’t miss a beat. Panting, he goes to the back of the house. He
searches methodically in the high weeds, particularly in front of
the cellar ventilation opening where the four cables are still
pouring out uselessly, and around the lopsided elm, and also the
spot where he pitched forward onto the empty beer bottles. All he
finds are more beer bottles and beer caps.

For weeks he turns Hanna’s house upside down
from cellar to attic, the closets again, the bathrooms, Hanna’s
room, his bedroom, even the ripe garbage pail, explored with wet
stinking hands. Who could have taken it? Ricky and his gang? If so,
where can he locate them? Hanna? She’s the prime suspect. The
others couldn’t cash the check. All Hanna had to do was rip it up
and be $84,000.30 richer. But he doesn’t know where to locate her
either. When he returned from the hospital he’d found her closet
and drawers yawning and empty. All she’d left were moldering pizzas
in the refrigerator and intimate black hairs near the shower drain.
Anyhow, would she have listened to his pleas?

He tries to phone Beth. The phone rings on
and on as he expected it would. Her windows are still in white
mourning. One drizzly pre-dawn day he sneaks over to her house for
the second time. He feels deep guilt as he recovers the key under
the mat. He tries to insert it and discovers the lock has been
changed. He experiences relief from the guilt, but then deep
depression. He goes back to bed fully dressed.

He writes her a long letter of justification.
He says that, appearances to the contrary, he was as much a victim
as she was. Until things got crazily out of control he’d faithfully
followed her instructions regarding the plants and the goldfish. He
is as emotionally annihilated by the events as she must be and in
addition very nearly suffered a heart attack.

He says that he loves her deeply and explains
about the house near the beach for the two of them, which was why
he’d let Harvey install those machines. It was for her birthday. He
has trouble making the beach sound real even to himself.

In a long PS he says that he left his blue
denim jacket somewhere in her house. Probably in the Mexican nook
but maybe in one of the bathrooms. If not there then in the living
room or the kitchen. He adds that she’ll find a wallet in the
inside breast pocket and what he wants her to do is this: take out
all the money (over $3,000) and keep it as compensation for the
damage to her living room although that damage, as explained above,
wasn’t really his fault. She could, if it’s not too much trouble,
drop the wallet in Harvey’s mailbox in case she doesn’t want to see
him immediately after what happened.

He drops the letter in her mailbox. It’s full
of junk mail. She’s still away in Phoenix. Or is it LA?

He never gets a reply to that letter. Not
even something hopeful like the letter returned unopened. That’s
communication of sorts. Maybe when she got back she did get rid of
the unopened letter but in her garbage pail along with the other
junk mail.

He sends her two other letters, much later
likely. In the first he probably repeats himself a little about
responsibility for the events but accepting more of it and also
about his deep love even though by this time that’s become a little
unreal too, like the beach. Traveling and voyaging a lot, he’s
become pretty indifferent to other things. He tells her that she
doesn’t have to bother returning the $5,000 he lent her for the
lawyer.

In the third letter, written months later in
a bad moment after the dog fiasco he encloses a $5,000 check. When
he goes outside for the first time in weeks to drop the letter in
her mailbox he discovers that her nameplate has disappeared. The
drapes and curtains have disappeared from the windows too. The
house stares vacantly like a dead man.

So he keeps the letter with the check. It had
been a sincere gesture. His bank account is back to a little over
$10,000. He has no old age dependency insurance. It’s true he
doesn’t have to worry about rent, won’t have to for the rest of his
life.

One rainy dark-blue evening there’s a sudden
yellowish dog pissing against the elm. How did it get in? Under or
over the fence? An underdog, unmistakably, with those dog-eared
ears and mournful yellowish eyes. It wags its clotted tail at the
sight of JW as though grateful for not being kicked but retreats
when he tries to pet it. JW fills a dish with scraps of meat and
noodles left over from his last meal and intended for his next. The
dog sniffs it once and turns away. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he
reminds the animal and goes back inside.

The next day the plate’s empty. After a few
more shared meals the dog allows JW to pet it. Soon it agrees to
come inside. It lies alongside the sofa for a while without
disturbing the trips except when sometimes it has senseless fits of
happiness and its tail thumps on the floor. JW gets into the habit
of leaving the front door ajar for the dog’s comings and
goings.

One day, he can’t remember when, Ricky comes
over with the audio outfit in his car. He’s visibly in bad need. He
claims he forced José to give it back. For his pains he wants
$2,000 for it, then $1,000, and so on down to $500. Absolutely last
price: $300. He’d have gone down to the price of a fix but JW gives
him $100 even though music means nothing to him now.

JW doesn’t even bother mentioning the wallet.
What for? Anyhow, he’s finally realized that if Ricky or one of the
gang had found the wallet they’d have already held him up for the
check. It’s Hanna for sure.

Ricky wants to talk about his mother. She
refuses to see him. He says that he loves her and never kicked her.
He weeps. JW’s not really interested in that subject either. The
thought doesn’t even occur to him to ask where she’s living now. He
finds it hard to talk about anything. He’s anxious to get back to
the cellar. The last person he’s talked to more than five seconds
was the owner of the wine and liquor store who’d run out of Lord’s
Vineyards. That was maybe two weeks ago.

Ricky wants to talk about The Golden Galaxy.
JW doesn’t. What suddenly JW wants to talk about is joints. The
machine doesn’t perform well at all, maybe because the images
aren’t amplified enough on the receiving end, he thinks. He’s in no
condition to get the stuff on his own. The price Ricky asks is a
rip-off but JW doesn’t feel like haggling.

So Ricky regularly supplies him with what he,
JW, had once procured for Harvey thanks to Mr Venezelous. Ricky
comes about once a month with the stuff in a scholarly briefcase
that contrasts with his tattered faded jeans, his dirty long hair
and scuffed high-heeled mother-kickers. He wants to talk to JW but
each time JW gives him the money fast in the vestibule and
practically has to push him out.

That goes on for quite some time. Then Ricky
disappears, for months it must have been, because JW has to depend
exclusively on the California sauterne for the amplifier effect,
his stomach remembers that constantly.

Every so often he pampers himself with a
joint on the sofa. But he’s careful not to touch what he’s hoarded
up for the big voyage if one day he dares.

One afternoon the bellowed name of Jesus
destroys a trading session with Charlie Schultz. JW was on the sofa
reconstructing the illustration of Gettysburg, number 67 or 76 of
the bubble-gum cards, the Great Battles series, perfect smoke
wreaths about cannon muzzles, raised sabers, joyous crimson
splotches on gray and blue uniforms.

It’s travel. Travel’s upstairs on the sofa
and unlimited. Voyages are down in the cellar, strictly limited and
less pleasant but more authentic.

Weeping on the threshold of the living room
in dramatic black, Hanna seems to fill the whole house. She has the
key to the house (technically hers) in her hand. He’d ignored the
doorbell as he always did, the doorbell and the telephone bell.

“Jesus, I thought it was Harv for a second
there, first that smell then you on the sofa,” she says and totters
to the striped armchair. It twangs under her weight, emits dust and
stuffing. She wipes her eyes and asks about it, also about the
flowered one facing it, and the tarnished oval mirror framed by
gilt rosebuds.

JW takes a final lip-searing drag and
reluctantly says that he found them up in the attic. His voice
sounds unfamiliar. He doesn’t use it much except to himself a
little and then practically a whisper, he’s so close. He concedes
the information that he nearly smashed the mirror negotiating it
down the steep stairs. It’s too long to say but he thinks: that
would have been seven years of bad luck, so an assurance of
relative longevity. Was that the bad luck involved? Someone had
once made that wise point. Who?