The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (17 page)

Ah, my opinion was now
his opinion. “Plainly we must warn the world. Nevertheless, the tangling of
time seems almost incredible.”

As we steadily made our
way back to the surface, as dark day followed dark day Verne continued to muse.
Was it possible to harness time? To step out of its flow and back in again
elsewhen? Yet by employing what possible technology? He quizzed me. “Did you
mention powerful magnetic fields . . . ?”

A practical method
eluded him. And how could our countrymen best be apprised of the future menace
of the Nazis?

“I wonder, I wonder if a
novel might be the most effective way. A tale about hostilities between France
now, and Germany of the next century . . . Different worlds at war. Hmm, a war
of the worlds, employing a time machine based on a plausible scientific
rationale . . .”

A Land at the End of the
Working Day Story

You can always be sure
you’ll get your money’s worth with Peter Crowther. Whilst the following story
is inspired by
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
it’s
much
more than that. Peter gets to the heart of our fascination with all of Verne’s
Voyages Extraordinaires
and takes us on not just one adventure, but
many.

“That which is far off
and exceeding deep, who can find it out?”

Ecclesiastes

“I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW this
place existed!” is the second thing the taller of the two strangers says, hands
(one brandishing a piece of creased paper) on his hips as he looks around Jack
Fedogan’s bar, his having blown in with his companion, a shorter man with
beer-bottle-bottom glasses, blown in off of the night-time street on a cold and
blustery late autumn evening.

And who could blame him.

The curiously named The
Land at the End of the Working Day walk-down bar, situated on the corner of
23rd and Fifth, just a stone’s throw from the tired regality of the Chelsea
Hotel, is not your average watering hole, not even given the myriad
strangenesses that make up twenty-first century Manhattan. And, in truth, there
are a lot of folks who don’t know the bar is there, finding it only when their
need is great — and that’s not always simply the need for beverages . . . such
as one of Jack Fedogan’s generous cocktails or a bottle of imported beer from
his well-stocked cellar or a bottle of his crisp Chardonnay or chewy claret,
always grown on the right slope and its vines always facing the afternoon sun;
nor is it just the need to hear some of the best .jazz piped over a bar PA this
side of New Orleans. There are needs and then there are needs — and you can
take
that
one to the bank.

So the stranger’s
opening gambit isn’t too unusual.

As he walks down the
stairs, the glorious harmonies of Stan Getz’s tenor and Lou Levy’s piano from
Getz’s
West Coast Jazz
album from 1955 are wafting through a soft fog of
cigarette smoke (“smoking ban, shmoking ban,” is Jack’s attitude) and
occasional glass-chinking, and mingling with muted laughter from the table
along from the counter and in front of the booths. But once he’s spoken, only
the music remains . . . while the patrons size him up. And the little guy, too
— the little guy who looks like a cross between Peter Lorre and that mad
scientist fella used to be constantly getting on the wrong side of good ol’
Captain Marvel.

Tonight, though, it’s
quiet in the Working Day.

Sitting in a booth at
the back of the room is a tall, black man — he’s tall even when he’s sitting
down . . . even slumped over a little, like he is right now — who’s nursing his
fourth Manhattan and repeatedly turning over a pack of Camels on the table in
front of him, working slowly but with admirable determination on emptying the
pack into the ashtray. So far he’s managed to cram seven butts in there and, as
the strangers descend the stairs, he’s considering starting on number eight.
But it won’t help the figure on the bottom of his bank statement, the one he
received only this morning and which he’s been worrying about all day . . .
particularly the accompanying letter asking him to come in for a meeting.

Two booths away from
him, a woman wearing a little too much pan-stick is checking her face in a tiny
mirror she’s taken from her purse. She’s sitting with her back to the
proceedings and is using the mirror to check the new arrivals. It’s a process
she’s worked in bars all around Manhattan — and, before that, in similar
establishments in Philly, Miami and Des Moines. Over time she’ll do other bars
in other cities, finally winding up several years hence spending the final few
minutes of her life at a table in a sleazy dive out in Queens where the PA
spurts Hip-Hop when she really wants to hear The Carpenters or Bread, and where
the barkeep calls her “Lady”, spitting it out at her like bad meat. She doesn’t
know that she’s checking the mirror to try figure out the road that lies behind
her, the one she’s travelled to get where she is today . . . with all the bad
decisions and failed relationships hovering over the blacktop like heat haze.
But there’s no answers in a mirror, just like there’s no answers anyplace. Only
more questions. She doesn’t spend too much time in one place, this “lady”, for
that very reason. The more time you spend the more questions you get asked. It’s
for this reason that she is about to leave the Working Day and, in so doing,
provide a springboard for the adventure ahead — for, after all, as all children
know, life is just one big series of adventures.

At the table over by the
counter — the noisy table — there are other questions being asked and answers
given. But these questions are not as difficult, nor the answers as potentially
distressing. Minutes earlier, as the strangers are crossing 23rd, big Edgar
Nornhoevan is addressing the slender Jim Leafman — Laurel to Edgar’s Hardy . .
. Norton to Edgar’s Ralph Kramden. Listen:

“Okay, this one,” Edgar
drawls, wiping beer froth from his top lip, “who said this one?
He has never
been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

Jim
Leafman, unsung star of Manhattan’s Refuse Department, shakes his
head. He’s been doing a lot of head-shaking this past half-hour. He doesn’t
like this game — doesn’t know diddly about writers and their creations, or
about statesmen (and women, of course) or politicians or Captains of Industry.
Jim prefers it when they just tell a few jokes but, with McCoy late — McCoy
Brewer, now gainfully employed by the Collars and Cuffs shirt and necktie
emporium down on 21st Street — he’s left to handle Edgar by himself, and he isn’t
making too good a job of it.

“No idea,” Jim says with
a shrug as the woman with the make-up weaves her slow and reluctant way past
them, then up the stairs and out into the night . . . which, if she had poetry
and not bile in her soul, she might say is calling to her on this particular
evening. But she just does what she does, this casualty of life, and doesn’t
ask questions.

Outside, the two
strangers dodge a Yellow and, glancing at the dog-eared parchment held by the
taller of the two, they look up through the gloom . . . their eyes scanning the
landscape of concrete towers, rain-slicked streets and store-windows.

“There’s nothing here,”
says one of them, the smaller one. “There must be,” comes the reply, though it
has more of hope in it than of conviction.

Then, a door opens at
the base of one of the buildings and a solitary figure emerges, pulling its
coat collar up against the breeze. For a second, the figure seems to see the
two men and they think that she — for it is clearly a woman, they now see — is
about to come over. But no, the figure turns and heads off in the direction of
downtown.

They watch her go and
then return their gaze to the now darkened area from which she emerged. And
they see a dimly-lit sign.

“The Land at the End of
the Working Day,” the taller of the two men reads, squinting into the gloom,
saying it almost reverentially. “It’s here,” he says softly, and they smile at
each other and continue across the street.

Meanwhile, back in the
Working Day, “Well
guess,
for crissakes,” is what Edgar snaps at Jim.

“I don’t know,” Jim
protests. “How can I guess if I don’t know?”

Edgar sighs, takes a
deep sup of his beer and blusters, “Okay, then who did he say it
about?”

“Edgar, I have no idea.”

“I’ll give you a clue,”
says Edgar, and he gets to his feet and mimes a matador waving his cape
groundwards at an approaching bull.

Jim looks around,
smiling apologetically, feeling a little like Walter Matthau’s Oscar sitting
alongside Jack Lemmon’s Felix, the latter noisily busy unblocking his sinuses.

“Oh, Jesus!” Edgar says,
thudding back into his seat. “It was William Faulkner talking about Ernest
Hemingway.” “Ernest Hemingway was a
bullfighter?”

Edgar glares at his
friend and pulls another card out of the box.

“Okay, how about this —”

“Why don’t I get a go
yet?”

“Because you haven’t
answered one
correctly yet.”

Jim studies his bottle
of Michelob, turns it around in his hands a couple times. “That doesn’t seem
fair to me.”

“Okay,” Edgar says, his
face lighting up as he removes another card from the small box in front of him
on the table. “Who said this —” He glances up at the sound of shoes on the
stairs leading down into the bar, sees two sets of feet descending, and
continues. “— and about whom?
His ears made him look like a taxicab with
both doors open.”

“That would be Howard
Hughes about Clark Gable,” one of the men — the tall one — says in a loud voice
with just a trace of an accent to it: English? French? German? Edgar can’t
pinpoint it. And then he turns to face a frowning Jack Fedogan and says: “I
didn’t even know this place existed.”

“We feel much the same
about you,” Jack grunts, placing a freshly polished glass upside down on the
shelf along the mirrored back wall.

“Wonderful place,” the
man says.

Jack Fedogan nods. “What’ll
it be?”

“Tell me,” the man says,
lowering his voice to a slightly conspiratorial level. “Do you have a back
room?”

“A back room?” Jack
repeats, placing a second glass on the shelf. “You mean a restroom?”

The stranger shakes his
head and looks around for some kind of acknowledgment that he’s using a
standard language.

“Ah, such a quaint
euphemism — you may be assured that if I had wanted to urinate or defecate then
I would have asked for a room in which to do just that and not one which I
desired to use simply for a rest. I would have asked for a toilet or a
lavatory, perhaps even a loo or a bog, or a john or a head —” He stops and
considers for a few seconds before adding, “or even a Crapper, named after the
gentleman who devised the modern toilet pedestal. But no, barkeeper, I mean
simply a back room — or, perhaps, a room in the back?”

“You bein’ funny?” Jack says.

“Are you laughing?”

Jack shakes his head
and, flipping the towel over his left shoulder, leans both hands on the counter
rail in front of him.

“Then I think it’s safe
to say I am not being funny.”

Jack nods a few seconds,
sizing up the stranger, taking in his clothes, the unfashionable winged collar
and foppish folded necktie.

“You some kind of inspector?”

The man shakes his head.

“So —” Jack stands
straight again. “— who exactly
might
you be?”

“Ah,” the man begins,
waving an arm theatrically, “I
might
be Monsieur Aronnax, professor in
the Museum of Paris, or Ned Land, the Canadian whaler, about to board the
Abraham
Lincoln
on an expedition to find the fabled narwhal that later turns out to
be the
Nautilus . . .
which, of course —” He turns to the smaller man
beside him. “- would make my diminutive friend here Conseil, the professor’s
devoted Flemish servant boy.”