Time's Arrow (6 page)

Many coworkers—Tod included—razz him about it and everything, but Mikio is free to do this, to read in his own way. Observant Jews, I've noticed, read this way too. People are free, then, they are generally free, then, are they? Well they don't
look
free. Tipping, staggering, with croaked or choking voices, blundering backward along lines seemingly already crossed, already mapped. Oh, the disgusted look on women's faces as they step backward through a doorway, out of the rain. Never watching where they are going, the people move through something prearranged, armed with lies. They're always looking forward to going places they've just come back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye. Lords of lies and trash—all kings of crap and trash. Signs say No Littering—but who to? We wouldn't dream of it. Government does that, at night, with trucks; or uniformed men come sadly at morning with their trolleys, dispensing our rubbish, and shit for the dogs.

I mustn't become a bore on the subject, but I have to say that in physical terms Tod and I are now feeling absolutely terrific. Corporeal life is not without its minor indignities. We still take it in the ass every morning, along with everybody else—but the whole thing's over in a trice these days. Tod, I salute you: what bowl know-how, what can can-do. I was more or less resigned to a lifetime of the tearful half hour. But now we're out of there after a tearful twenty minutes.

Each day, before the mirror, as I inspect Tod's humanity—he shows no sign of noticing the improvement. It's almost as if he has no point of comparison. I want to click my heels, I want to clench my fist:
Yes.
Why aren't people happier about how great they're feeling, relatively? Why don't we hug each other all the time, saying, "How
about
this?"

Accordingly, after many false starts, after many hours in the sunless sea of bafflement, apology, and flopsweat, Tod and I have finally cut it with Irene. She was impeccably tactful, and drew no extra attention to the breakthrough.

Tod also played it cool: all in a day's work. But I was ecstatic. I was beside myself with pride. Almost certainly I was overreacting, as usual. I've calmed down a little. Now I'm just gorgeously smug. This is love. This is life. The knack, the trick: there turns out to be nothing to it. Life and love go together. It comes natural.

High romance brings with it, or seems to bring with it (I'm getting more and more tentative about cause and effect), an expansion of my role here at AMS. I say
role
because doctoring involves you in a kind of cultural performance, the gestures, the lilts, the motions of decent power. It's all okay. Society humors it. I have vacated that nice little office in back there, making way for an older man, and am now more often to be found in the consulting rooms. I don't just do old men anymore. I do women and children too. Even babies. It's as if we can't leave the babies alone. In fact Tod tends to be more upbeat with them here than he is at home (at home, in slippers and dressing gown, longsufferingly shuffling). The babies get wheeled or carried in here, and they're well enough, and you look them over and say something like "This little fella's just fine." And you're always dead wrong. Always. A day or two later the baby will be back, crimson-eared, or whoofing with croup. And you never do a damn thing for them. The challenge, I suppose, is to keep at it while somehow remaining decent.

Then there are the cases that actually entail the strange meeting of man-made glass or metal and human flesh. And human blood. Now this I dependably find a real throw-up number but there's never anything too horrendous because, as my colleagues are always saying, we're at the darning-and-patching level of the biomedical business: the serious cases we bring in direct, and at speed, from the city hospitals, and we in our turn get rid of them as quickly as we can. So you can say this for the maimed and the mangled. They're out of here. Yes, it's quite a deal, at AMS, on Route 6. No wonder people sometimes start right off with an official complaint or even a writ. As for home calls, we refuse over the phone even before we're asked—before we can hear the mother's panic, the baby's cries. We say it's
not our policy.
If you want to get fucked up, you've got to come on over to our place. The money's reasonable. And it doesn't take that long.

Rather as I feared they would, babies have started showing up in Tod's dreams. They've shown up. Or, at least, one of them has. Nothing gruesome happens, and I am coping with it fine so far.

You naturally associate babies with defenselessness. But that's not how it is in the dream. In the dream, the baby wields incredible power. It has the power, the ultimate power of life and death over its parents, its older brothers and sisters, its grandparents, and indeed everybody else who is gathered in the room. There are about thirty of them in there, although the room, if it is a room, can't be much bigger than Tod's nook of a kitchen. The room is dark. More than this, the room is black. Despite the power it wields, the baby is weeping. Perhaps it weeps precisely because of this sinister reversal—the new and desperate responsibilities that power brings. In the faintest of whispers the parents try to give comfort, try to quieten: for a moment it seems that they might even have to
stifle.
There is that excruciating temptation. Because the baby's drastic ascendancy has to do with its voice. Not its fat fists, its useless legs, but its voice, the sounds it makes, its capacity to weep. As usual, the parents have the power of life and death over the baby, which all parents have. Now, though, in these special circumstances and in this special room, the baby has the power over them. And over everybody else who is gathered there. About thirty souls.

The whole thing is a lot tougher on Tod than it is on me.
I'm
always awake when the dreams happen. And I am innocent. . . . The sick shine of imposture and accusation— I don't get that. I know he's only dreaming. I just settle back, with some apprehension, admittedly, and give witness to the late show screened by Tod's head, by his secret mind—by his future. When the time comes to experience the events that Tod's dreams foretell (when we find out, for instance, how the baby came to wield such power), then maybe I will take it harder. Tod himself weeps like a baby before the dreams happen. Occasionally, nowadays, Irene is around to psych him up before he goes in there.

On the TV (look)—on the rooftop, on the ledge, high up, the crying man in the dirty white shirt, holding a baby. Nearby, a policeman, urgently crouched, all cocked and bunched for this urgent encounter or transaction. The cop is saying through his bullhorn that he wants to take the baby. In effect, he wants to disarm the crying man in the dirty white shirt. The crying man has no weapon. The baby is the weapon.

That's not how things stand in the black room, with its groping carbon, its stilled figures. I just know this. In here, the baby is not a weapon. In here, the baby is more like a bomb.

Just when Tod has established our relationship with Irene on a secure footing, the kind of setup that any sane man would kill for, with her punctual visits and affectionate phone calls, the movies we enjoy together, the fine dining, the peace and safety (the forgiveness) that her presence confers, plus the exquisitely torpid lovemaking that takes place right on the button every couple of months or so, and reaching the stage, now, where I think we can tackle her, gently but firmly, about her untidiness around the house, because it's best to get these things out in the open, not to let them rankle and fester, and so on—guess what. Tod has started fooling around. Yeah. With Gay nor.

One Sunday afternoon we took a trancelike ride in the car out to Roxbury, and parked, and strolled the streets, and there she was, standing at her front door in a blue dressing gown with her arms folded and with a look of amused reproach on her face. "You old bastard," she called out. But we got talking to her anyway. I didn't think anything was up until we went inside. Tod, I wanted to say: don't do this. The voice of conscience. It speaks in a whisper. Nobody hears it. One thing led to another—actually it was more like the other way around. After an initial lull we now go out to Gay nor's regularly, every other week.

It's called two-timing, or double-lifting, and that's exactly how it feels. There is integrity-loss. On the other hand it's a buzz physically, I admit, because our new friend has been around quite a bit longer than Irene. This little honey's only fifty-four. But I'm upset. To be frank, I'm scandalized. Last week he went out with
another
one: Elsa. Just lunch, fortunately. It was a very acrimonious occasion and she called us some terrible names. I thought it was a disaster but something tells me that Tod's still hopeful. Is this allowed? I feel as if we're about to get arrested. What's the limit?

Suddenly, to Tod's glands, the world is a woman. Even the sharpness of the city, on a wet night, the veils of rain, the stained darkness—it's a woman. Their shapes are everywhere, and sending messages to his glands. I wonder if Tod's new interest in women is a professional interest, connected to his dealings with them at AMS: his custodial scrutiny of disturbed or distempered female flesh. But his new interest in women seems far too broad and anarchical; it isn't specialized. Unwinding, we sink into the armchair with a coffee cup, and gaze out of the window, and then he'll see an outline across the road
(now
what?), through the fence, through the leaves, and he'll vainly crane and peer, and tip forward onto his feet.

Why? In case it's a woman.

The parallaxes of the stockyards shift and quake. Industry is coming to the city. Gas is cheap. Things move faster than they used to. The insane have been taken off the street; we don't ask where they've disappeared to. Never ask. It's better if you never ask. No longer the nomads, the nightrunners . . . Instead there is a burly altruism abroad. People all have jobs now, at the steel mill and the auto plant. They wash the wind. Just as they clean up all the trash and litter, they also clean up the earth and the sky, transmogrifying cars, turning tools, parts, weapons, bolts, into carbon and iron. They've really got to grips with their environmental problems, facing them squarely, with common purpose. Time for talk is over. There is no talk. Just action. To total sickness you bring total cure. Now there's less room for thought and for feeling, and it seems a great tiredness is good for keeping people steady. Work liberates: Friday evenings, as they move off toward it, how they laugh and shout and roll their shoulders.

Tod loves crowds. In crowds you can be a leader without anyone noticing. Like with the flared pants. He's been sporting those flares of his for quite some time and now everyone is into them. Also the flower shirts and the unctuous neckerchiefs, and that caftan or
dhoti
he dons at weekends—white, and similar in cut to his surgical smock, but with different associations. It's disgusting at his age, I agree, but old people do it and no young people say they can't. Fashion is crowds. Tod wears the red armband too, along with everybody else. Crowds make me paranoid and claustrophobic but Tod seeks and loves the company of crowds. With rapture and relief he elides with the larger unit, the glowing mass. He sheds the thing he often can't seem to bear: his identity, his quiddity, lost in the crowd's promiscuity. My presence is never tinier. But it's the same story. Render up your soul, and gain power.

Under thunderheads, beneath cloudcover like a coated tongue with a doctor's penlight playing on it, as in a dark carnival, we protest the Vietnam War, with vivified, uplifted faces, with the press of bodies all moving the same way, and with that sense of being both lost and right, lost and right. We're half a mile long and young and old and white and black and girl and boy, looking for a monster to kill or create. Signs and banners say the usual things about peace, about war, together with more particular demands like END DE FACTO SEGREGATION and FIRE MRS. AINTREY. Tod Stares at FIRE MRS. AINTREY. He doesn't want to fire Mrs. Aintrey. He probably wants to find Mrs. Aintrey—and love her up. He certainly couldn't give two shits about the Vietnam War. Neither is he here, in fairness, just to get women. On the contrary: he's here to get rid of them, to lose them, to drift away from them in the heat and safety of the crowd.

There is another war coming. Oh, yes, we do know that. A big war, a world war, which will roll through villages. It wearies me to imagine the preparations that will prove necessary, what dismantlings and shovelings, what wounds worked open for the sudden closure. . . . There's exactly twenty-five years to go before it starts. That's how come there's so much stuff about it everywhere you look: even everywhere
Tod
looks. I thought for a while that the information would just go on accumulating from here on in, but thank God it's already begun dropping off.

For Tod is highly sensitive to this material. It affects him like a smell, like a chime. Too late . . . There is the same kind of trigger when he hears that other language, not such a rare occurrence now, especially in Roxbury, where he wanders on those Sundays; it is a language in which machines might converse when no human being is around to listen. A third thing makes the trigger slip: nail-clipping. It's the odor the sallow rinds give off, as they cook and crackle in the fire. . . .

I've seen the dates. We're nowhere near young enough for the present war, but when the world war comes—we'll be just right to fight it. We are, after all, a superb physical specimen. Our feet aren't flat. Our vision is clear. We're not clubfooted or Marxist or nuts. We have no conscientious objections or anything of that kind. We're perfect.

The standard affair, nowadays, will start something like this. It starts, in effect, with a moment of
horror.

Most typically it starts with a late-night drive to some little restaurant. The waiter has just brought us our dough, our honorarium or whatever it is, and we're sitting there quietly snorting and drooling into our brandy balloon, and relishing a perspicacious perfecto. We become aware that people are looking at us. And we don't like it when people are looking at us. ... Then our eyes will be firmly caught and firmly held by a bent female figure hurrying in through the door and across the room toward us. Fair, dark, slim, plump, elegant, not so elegant. Then she spins round. It's a big power moment when they spin round, with the flourish of challenge, and we get to see what they look like. Speaking personally, for now, it's always cause for alarm, when they spin round—whatever they look like. Because here's the weird thing about these relationships with women: you get everything on the first date. Well, every now and then it's the second date, but generally it's the first. Instant invasion. Instant invasion and lordship. An hour or two here, max, is all it takes. Oh, mercy. You can go up to a woman on a street corner and start yelling at her and ten minutes later she's back at your place doing God knows what. On more than one occasion the first physical contact, the first touch, has been a slap or a shove: the swipe of her hand across Tod's feeble leer of—what? Lust? Contempt? All that needs to happen, in between, is this moment of horror I mentioned. It activates; it legitimates. It seems to be a necessary condition.