Time Travail (44 page)

One evening, totally amplified, JW finds
himself luring the yellowish dog with a frozen lambchop to the
plugged-in helmet set at X 200. He’s in bad need of an extra pair
of hands to crown the whining yelping struggling dog. It breaks
loose and bolts up the cellar stairs in three howling leaps.
Sitting on the floor JW reflects that anyhow the size of the helmet
would have required a much bigger dog to test it on. Also all that
rough hair would have insulated the animal. A Mexican hairless? Far
too small. And where can you find a stray Mexican hairless this far
north? Now JW imagines the yellowish dog helmeted at the console
and joining the humping dog sequence at X 9999. JW starts laughing
and laughing at the thought of canine pornography.

When he pulls himself together and out of the
cellar with the thawing lambchop the dog is gone. He never comes
back. JW misses him but consoles himself by reflecting that he
won’t have to leave the front door ajar anymore. It’s winter by
then and there are drafts. He leaves it ajar anyhow for quite a
long time. When he finally closes it he feels deeply depressed and
writes his last letter to Beth Anderson, thinking she still
occupies that house.

One evening in some month or other at 10:23
the doorbell wakes him up. He gets out of bed and negotiates the
stairs down to the door although normally he never answers the
doorbell. It’s no time of day – night, actually – to be visiting
people, he grumbles as he opens the door. When she sees him clearly
she gives a little cry and says, “Mr Morgenstern, what have you
done with Professor Weizman?” It’s a bad joke and he starts closing
the door on her. “Please take this and give it to him,” she says,
thrusting her usual bouquet of shopworn flowers at him. “Say it’s
from me. Why doesn’t he phone?”

When the door shuts on her JW is angered to
see that the flowers are worse than shopworn: fit for the
garbage-pail. He throws them on the floor and goes back to bed. In
the morning he doesn’t see the flowers where he thought he threw
them. He looks all over, even in the garbage pail. It sticks its
tongue out at him with a mottled banana-peel. He’ll have to get
around to emptying the pail. He pokes about in it but doesn’t find
the flowers. By then he doesn’t expect to.

He’s forgotten her phone number and has to
look it up. A woman’s voice tells him Mrs Anderson moved five
months ago, she doesn’t know where. The vacant stare of the house
comes back to him now. But that couldn’t be five months ago, could
it? He can’t find her new address in the phone book. Finally he
realizes the phone book’s ten years old. Maybe she’s moved to
Phoenix or LA. She could be anywhere. Ricky knows where she lives
but Ricky hasn’t come for months. He wishes he’d come. The
California sauterne’s wrecking his stomach.

The next time JW goes shopping (which is
about once a month) he passes in front of Dave and Tom’s but
doesn’t see her through the plate glass window. A month or so later
on the way to the supermarket again, he goes inside. She isn’t
there. It’s too much bother asking about her but he feels he has to
justify his presence so he buys the cheapest bouquet they have –
something like daisies but with a colored heart – and when he gets
back with all the groceries he sticks the flowers on the little
round table near the door and forgets about them. One day he sees
them there, fit for the garbage pail, which is where he puts
them.

One night JW dreams he’s time-traveling down
in the cellar and has Rebecca almost in focus when there’s a
terrific banging somewhere upstairs. He thinks it’s the elm in a
storm. But now it comes in triple tattoos, too fast to be the
branch. He dreams he leaves the cellar and opens the front door.
It’s the woman next door, the one with the tulips. Her fist is
raised for another tattoo or to strike him. She stares at him in
theatrical horror. “What’s happened to you? You’ve got roaches on
you.” It doesn’t bother him anymore. They could inscribe whatever
they liked on his stone. But it was meant as an insult.

He pushes her away from the door as hard as
he can and insults her back. He locks the door, double-bolts it. He
dreams he can hear her crying from the other side of his safely
bolted door, ringing and hammering again. To escape it he goes
upstairs to bed and has dreams within that dream. They’re even
worse, involving his dead son.

Violent stomach pain wakes him up. He needs
solid food. He remembers there’s no food in the house. He’ll have
to confront the glare of the sky and go shopping. When he tries to
open the door he finds it locked and double-bolted, something he
never does, anyhow doesn’t remember doing.

One day the doorbell rings with unusual
persistence. JW’s on his sofa. It finally stops. It always does
sooner or later. Immediately after, though, there’s a sharp rapping
on the window. The intruder, distorted by the dirty panes into
something like a bad time-image, makes urgent obscure gestures and
vanishes. The doorbell resumes.

JW gets up, opens, stares and finally
recognizes the transformed visitor and backdrop. JW remembers that
the last time he opened the door on him ragged and sullen it was
cold and white outside. It’s hot and green now and there he stands,
a forward time-traveler from the corny fifties with a button-down
collar, quiet tie, a suit (who wears suits now?) with sharply
creased trousers breaking perfectly on shiny shoes, a short
haircut, a persistently ecstatic smile. That smile is the thing
that disguises him most of all. JW almost smiles ecstatically
himself.

“It’s about time,” he says in an excited
rusty voice and guides Ricky through the mess to the flowered
armchair. He tells him to wait. He goes upstairs and brings back
the money. The other counts it carefully, inscribes the amount in a
neat black address-book, places the money in a buff envelope and
the envelope on his lap. He reinforces his smile and takes out of
the briefcase a jewel-case with stars on the lid, a funny disguise
for the stuff.

He opens it, revealing three rings on violet
plush. One of the rings is formed by entwined snakes with red eyes.
All three rings look familiar. “Please choose, Professor Weizman.
Two hundred dollars more and you can have two, twice the spiritual
force.”

JW lunges forward and snatches the money
back. “I want the stuff,” he mumbles, perhaps imploringly. Ricky
goes on smiling. He puts the jewel case back in the briefcase and
pulls out a sheaf of leaflets. “No charge, of course.” He withdraws
his shiny shoe quickly from the path of a survivor roach and
launches into mystical gibberish. JW’s heard it all before. He
stares at his briefcase and mutters: “Cut the shit. Give me the
stuff.”

All the new Ricky has are the rings and more
leaflets. He speaks of rebirth, cites himself as an example of it,
urges it upon JW. JW orders him out of the house. Before he goes
(smiling even more intensely) he leaves his mother’s address and
phone-number. “She would like so much to hear from you, Professor
Weizman. We all would. I’ll be back.”

Each time he comes, constantly now it seems,
it’s the same story. In his corny 1950 uniform, with his intense
mad smile, he holds aloft his briefcase to lure JW into widening
the crack of the front door into wide welcome. “Wonderful things
for you Professor Weizman!” JW always widens the crack on the off
chance that the briefcase contains the uncosmic
veil-of-reality-lifting stuff he’s craving to fuel his voyages
with. He ended by offering double the usual rip-off price, then
triple.

He sullenly convoys his impeccable visitor
through the minefield of disorder and dirt to the dead room. Where
of course the nut pulls out his mystical shit. He’s incorruptible.
He talks about his mother’s spiritual progress. “We’re guiding
her.” JW guesses that “we” is Ricky and his father. He feels
faintly sorry for her but sorrier for himself, constantly tricked
that way.

Ricky has new conversion tactics. He’s given
up frontal assault in favor of flank harassment. Each time he comes
he speaks about a great InGathering (“perhaps the very last”)
scheduled soon at Coney Island. Does Corny Island still exist? “We
would very much like you to come,” Ricky says. He urges JW to fight
free of Glauk and his Veil of Irreality even while JW feebly pushes
him out of the house. “Thank you, thank you,” he says as the door
slams shut on him.

JW had completely forgotten Coney Island. He
returns to the sofa and only half-succeeds in riding the Ferris
Wheel with his parents. He tries hard to imagine the crowds on
Coney Island beach way back. He can’t go beyond abstract knowledge
of their swarming existence. He tries and tries. Something’s
wrong.

Failure to repossess new fragments of the
past contaminates the old ones. Things start going wrong with the
trips. Memories once possessed elude him. He can’t picture the
stamps or the bubblegum cards. His mother’s face near the
hump-backed radio refuses to materialize. He can’t hear her
scandalized joyous throat-sound. The ceiling screen overhead gives
him nothing but its network of cracks. He finds himself evicted
into the trivial and meaningless present. He wanders about the
house aimlessly, sleeps enormously but poorly. He clings to the
hope that it’s cyclic and that after this blankness he’ll be able
to travel again.

One day he returns to the first experimental
time-cassettes after a long absence and discovers that Miss Forster
has grown dim. So have the dogs in bucking expressionless union. In
the other living room Rachel – whichever one of the three presumed
persons on the presumed sofa she may be – is fading for good. She’s
never emerged out of blur, but as blur she’s fading too. JW recalls
that Harvey had spoken of this impermanence of the time-cassettes.
But soon he realizes that the other images directly pumped out of
the dead room upstairs are going too. Everything is going.

One night, appalled by the accelerating
decomposition of doorknobs and his teacher’s smile, he opens the
box with the small hoard set aside for the helmeted voyage he’s
kept putting off. He does it for courage as well as for
amplification. He coifs the helmet at X 200 for her bedroom with
that fading vertical blur merging with the fading horizontal
blur.

On the very threshold of entry, forefinger
rigid on the red dispatching button, he’s caught by lucidity and
doesn’t dare. It’s not the first time. He removes the helmet,
consumes more of the hoard, lurches upstairs and tries again to
crack Harvey’s navigational simplifications. Suddenly everything
makes sense to his luminous mind. He almost breaks his neck
storming down the cellar steps.

He’s like a cross-handed virtuoso over the
electronic keyboard. He produces not useless music but precious
things in marvelous clarity: the cat, the salesman, the rabbi, the
maid, even something new, Harvey in his early thirties. Harvey
seems to be staring solemnly at him. He slowly smiles as in
encouragement.

Finally JW gets his mother and Mrs
Morgenstern in their time-renovated armchairs but as never before:
in sharp focus, color and dimension. He’s not a victim of random
selection anymore. He can concentrate on his mother’s face and even
stop the image on her hazel eyes.

Joyful at having at last seen her eyes, he
solicits the first of the two time-cassettes from the burned down
house before fire. With no need for the perilous helmet, he sees
Rachel emerging from blur. She was (had been) the middle figure on
the sofa. She’s wearing a blue blouse with a little-girl collar and
a blue ribbon in her hair and is looking at television. Once she
looks his way and, unbearably lovely, smiles. He stops her image on
that smile. He can almost believe she sees him. It must be Harvey
entering the room. He falls asleep over that image. When he awakes,
the time-cassette has unwound to the end and the screen’s
blank.

He closes his eyes. Loved-ones and precious
things come back that way too. He sees, with unprecedented
authenticity, Momma and Poppa leaning toward the big square radio,
listening to the poor shit blubbering out his sins. Mr Anthony’s
voice, warm and consoling, tells him to return to the source of
forgiveness. Thank you, thank you, Mr Anthony.

Things completely forgotten come back. He
remembers the contents of the second stamp album his mother had
offered him for Christmas a year after the sale of the first one:
the Penny Black with backward-gazing young Victoria on it, the US
1847 Five-Cent Franklin, the US 1876 Commemorative. The bubblegum
Great Battle cards come back too with marvelous detail and color:
Stalingrad, The Liberation of Paris, The Battle of the Bulge.

Now a skilled sequencing summons Keith to the
screen. It’s a wonderfully clear image in three-dimensional color.
He’s nicely dressed and looks great. JW tells him so. He doesn’t
greet his father or smile but he keeps on staring at him, there can
be no doubt about that. Which proves Harvey was wrong, he thinks
jubilantly, when he said that if we can see them they can’t ever
see us. Because Keith sees JW all right, keeps staring at him,
disapprovingly. JW feels ashamed of his wrinkled stained clothes
and unshaven face, the empty bottles and joint-butts. He feels like
telling Keith he shouldn’t judge his father too harshly the way his
father had once judged him. Still, JW feels so glad to see his son
looking that great even if it’s humiliating to be seen by him the
way he (JW) is.

Then he senses something wrong. It focuses
painfully. Keith’s never been in this house, it’s not possible, he
was never within the catchment-area of the machine. He starts
fading. JW says, don’t go, but he goes.

That pulls him out of it into total
emptiness. The other acquisitions have gone too. He can’t picture
his mother’s face, can’t remember the sound of her scandalized
joyous throat sound. Now he recalls that in that last vision of her
the radio was square and Mr Anthony’s voice consoling. But that
radio had been humpbacked. And Mr Anthony never offered absolution.
Inauthentic a second time, his mother in the striped armchair. Her
eyes were (had been) blue, not hazel. He remembers too that there’d
never been a second stamp album after the first one. He’d never
possessed those precious longed-for issues like the 1847 Five-Cent
Franklin and the 1876 Commemorative. JW remembers that the
bubble-gum cards with Charlie Schulz had been years before
Stalingrad, The Liberation of Paris and The Battle of the Bulge.
Also that television had been commercialized after the war. How
could Rachel have been looking at television during the war?