Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (51 page)

“Now it's my turn,” I repeated, and I went over to the window and looked down.

“Looking for yourself?” Alice wanted to know.

“That's a damn poor joke.”

“Sorry. Really, I am, Bob.” She got up and came over to me and put her arm through mine. “I know you have trouble. Why don't you try to tell me?”

“Will you believe me?”

“I think I can believe anything, now.”

“Good. Now sit down again. I want you to sit down and look at me.” She did this dutifully, and rested her elbow on the arm of the chair, her chin on her knuckles, and looked at me. “I am your husband, Robert Clyde Bottman. Right?”

“I accept that.”

“And all those others you saw today—they were also me, your husband, Robert Clyde Bottman—right?”

She nodded.

“What do you make of it?”

“Oh, no—not me. As soon as I try to make anything out of it, I'll go screaming mad. What do you make of it?”

“I'll tell you,” I said. “This morning, at ten-thirty, you left the house to go shopping downtown. I was correcting papers. Shortly after you left, the bell rang. I opened the door—and there I was. The first one.”

“Gray herringbone, you mean.”

“Exactly. And I wasn't too surprised at first. He looked familiar, but nobody really knows what they look like to someone else. The worst moment came when I discovered that it was myself—not an imitation, not a copy, not a fraud, not proof that the devil actually exists, but myself. It was me. I was me. It was me. We both were Robert Clyde Bottman. We both were the real thing. Do you understand?”

For the first time, there was fear and horror in my wife's face as she shook her head and said, “No—I don't, Bob.”

“Listen,” I went on. “He explained it to me. Or I explained it to me, take your choice. And while he was explaining, the doorbell rang, and I opened it, and there I was again. Three of us now. Then we began to fight it out philosophically, and the doorbell rang again. Four of us—”

“Bob, tell me!”

“Yes—now listen. Take today in terms of time. What happens to it when tomorrow comes?”

“Oh, it's yesterday, and stop that, Bob. Tell me what happened. I can't stand much more of this.”

“And I'm. trying to tell you, believe me, Alice. But first we have to talk about time. What is time?”

“Bob, I don't know what time is. Time is time. It passes.”

“And I don't know any more than that, when you come right down to it. And neither does anyone else. But it's been a philosophical football for ages. I walk across this room. Time passes. I have been in a number of places just in this room, all connected by my actual physical being. What happened to me as I was two minutes ago? I was. I cease to exist. I reappear.”

“Nonsense,” Alice snorted. “You're here all the time.”

“Because I am connected with myself in terms of time. Suppose time is an aspect of motion. No motion, no time. If you will, think of a path in terms of motion. You move along it—everything we are conscious of moves in parallel terms. But nothing disappears—it is all there always, yesterday, tomorrow, a million years from now—a reality that we are conscious of only in the flickering transition of now—this moment, this instant.”

“I don't understand that at all, and I don't believe it either,” Alice said. “Is this some new kismet—fate, a future ordained for us?”

“No, no,” I said impatiently. “It's not that. The path isn't fixed. It's fluid, it changes all the time. But we can't sit and argue about it, because we're moving along it. And I have to tell you before we go too far. Those other myselfs—”

“Just call them gray herringbone,” Alice said weakly.

“Very well, grey herringbone. They told me what happened today.”

“Before it happened?”

“Before it happened and after it happened. That makes no difference. It's a paradox. That's why this sort of thing can't be handled by the mental equipment we have. There's no room for paradox. The most illogical man is still logical in terms of paradox. Today happened to me. I corrected the papers. You came home. Professor Dunbar telephoned and told me about the cat. I rushed over to his place. I took a panel of transistors with me, found where his circuit burned out, rewired it. You see, I had wired it originally. I was trembling with excitement then—”

“You
were trembling with excitement?” Alice said.

“Yes. Well, I react to different things. You can't imagine how exciting this was—actually to warp space, even if a tiny bit of it. I wasn't thinking about time then. You see, I had picked up the professor's cat outside his door, and I brought it in with me. There were three cats there, but I didn't think twice about that. I picked up the one on the doorstep and brought it in. The professor was delighted. We decided that a space-warp had placed the cat outside the house. So when I hooked in the transistors and threw the power, I stepped between the electrode myself. What could be more natural?”

“Nothing,” Alice said. “Oh—nothing at all. Very natural, only they give the younger generations to you to be taught.”

“And that was five P.M., today.”

“And now it's four-thirty
P.M.,”
Alice shrugged. “Today was, but it isn't yet. For God's sake, Bob, I am a woman. Talk sense to me!”

“I am trying to. You must accept it—don't think about it, accept it. The warp was in time, maybe in space too, maybe the two are inseparable. We only had three hundred amps—a very slight effect, a tiny loop or twist in time, and then it snapped back. But the damage was done. My own particular time belt now had a five hour loop in it. In other words, it was repeated, I was stranded here—no, I don't make sense, do I?”

“I'm afraid not,” Alice agreed sadly. “You said it happened.”

“It did. But I was pushed back to before it happened. I went straight to the apartment. I rang the bell. I opened the door and let myself in. I told myself—”

“Stop that!” Alice cried. “Stop talking about yourself. Say gray herringbone, if you must.”

“All right. Gray herringbone, and he told me what had happened. Heaven knows how many times the loop had repeated already—”

“Wouldn't you know if it repeated?”

“How could I know? My own consciousness is only for now—not for yesterday, not for tomorrow. How could I know?”

Alice shook her head dumbly.

“Anyway,” I continued desperately, “today, my today, our today, this morning, I decided to stop it. I had to stop it. I would go insane, the whole world would go insane if I didn't stop it. But they—the gray herringbones—they didn't want me to stop it.”

“Why?”

“Because they were afraid. They were afraid that they would die. They want to live as much as I do. I am the first one, and therefore the real me; but they are also me—different moments of consciousness in me—but they are me. But they couldn't stop me. They couldn't interfere with me. When I told them to get out, they had to go. If they interfered, it might mean death for them too. So they left. But some of them watched downstairs—and some in other places, and all of them myself. Do you wonder that I am half insane?”

“All right, my dear,” Alice said gently. “What did you do then?”

“I put on the blue suit, not the gray one. I climbed down the fire-escape, through the house opposite ours, hailed a cab, and checked in here at the hotel.”

“But if what you say is true,” Alice said, beginning to share my own fear and horror, “any one of you—of the gray herringbone—can go to Dunbar instead—”

I nodded. “I thought of that. I'm not certain it would work that way. But to make sure, I took the transistor panel with me. It would take at least ten hours of work and a good electronics shop to duplicate it. They can repair the circuit—and maybe it will be enough power for a cat, but not for a man. I can swear that. Not for a man—”

“But if they do?”

I shook my head. “I don't know. I just don't know. Nothing will ever again be the way it was. How many of me will the world contain? I don't know—”

“And if you stop it, Bob?” Whether she understood me or not, she believed me. Her eyes said that; the fear was deep and wet and sick in her eyes.

“I can't answer that,” I shrugged. “I don't know. We just scraped at a great mystery. I don't know. All we can do is sit and wait. Less than a half hour to five o'clock, so it's not too long to wait.”

Then we waited. At first we tried to talk, but we couldn't talk much. Then we were silent. Then, a few minutes before five o'clock, Alice came over to me and kissed me. I pushed her back and into her chair. “I've got to be alone for this.” I waited for anything, more afraid than I ever have been before that or since, and then it was five o'clock. We compared watches. We called the desk and checked the time. It was five minutes past the hour. Then Alice began to cry, and I let her cry it out. Then we decided to go home.

There was a crowd and commotion down in the lobby, but we didn't stop. Later I realized that one of them would have remembered that I liked the Waldorf and would go there, but then we didn't stop.

We got a cab. As we drove uptown, we saw seven separate crowds, accident crowds, which are unmistakable in New York. “This town is becoming a battlefront,” the driver said. We didn't say anything at all. But there were no gray herringbone, not along the way, not in front of the house we lived in and not waiting for us in our apartment.

We were home less than an hour when the police came. Two plainclothes men and two men in uniform. They talked like cops and wanted to know whether I was Professor Robert Clyde Bottman.

“That's right.”

“What do you do?”

“I teach physics at Columbia University.”

“You got anything to identify yourself?”

“Well, I live here,” I said. “Of course I have.”

“You got pictures of yourself?”

I wanted to know if they had gone out of their minds, but Alice smiled sweetly and brought our scrapbook and our family album. That seemed to satisfy them a little; wholly satisfied, they never were. For in three places in New York, friends of mine had been talking to me when I disappeared. Just disappeared—poof, and done with.

One of the plainclothes men asked if I was twins, and the other said, “He'd have to be better than triplets.”

Then they called downtown, and discovered that the number of men around town—gray herringbone suits and bald—reported to have disappeared into thin air, poof, at exactly 5:00 o'clock, had reached seventy-eight, and was mounting steadily. They stared at me without saying anything.

They argued about arresting me; one wanted to, the other didn't. They called downtown again, and then they told me not to leave town without notifying them, and then they left. A little while later, Professor Dunbar rung our doorbell.

“Ah, there you are,” he said. “I turned my back for a moment, and you were gone. Really, Bob, you must trace that circuit again.”

Alice smiled and promised that I would come tomorrow and fix the circuit once and for all.

As the professor was leaving, he said, “Most interesting thing, you know. There must have been two dozen cats outside when I left. All of them exactly like Prudence.”

“Prudence is the Professor's cat,” I explained to Alice.

“Oh, I have Prudence back—oh, yes. I'm very fond of cats. But I never realized how alike they can be.”

“And I am sure we look alike to cats, Professor Dunbar,” Alice said.

“Oh good. Very good indeed. I never thought of it that way. But I suppose we do. Well, tomorrow's another day.”

“Thank God it is,” Alice said.

We let him out and Alice made scrambled eggs for dinner, and then the press began to arrive. They were tiring, but we stuck to our ignorance and smiled disbelievingly about men in gray herringbone suits disappearing into thin air. I don't know whether it is for better or worse. For a few days, it was a bigger thing than flying saucers, and it made me rather uncomfortable at school. But Alice says it won't last.

It's her theory that I and my gray herringbone suit will be forgotten in a general problem of cats. Professor Dunbar lives in the North Bronx, and when we drove up to his house the following day, to fix a circuit' once and for all and to fix it properly, we counted over a hundred cats. Those were the ones we saw. Alice says that cats that don't disappear—poof—have more lasting interest than college professors who do. Alice says if man can learn to live with the atom, he can learn to live with cats. Anyway, you can't hold science back, and sooner or later, someone else will tie a knot in time. Only I don't like to think about it.

23
The Interval

Few will face it, but there is a beginning and an end; that's the way it is, and after you turn fifty, it stares you in the face. You read the obituary pages and you find that people of your own age and people even younger than you are dying, and then it closes in on you and you can be alone, the way I was. When you are decently married for a long, long while you are fortunate to go first; but if you are left behind, you keep looking at yourself and wondering what you are waiting for.

I went up to northern Connecticut, to the foothills of the Berkshires, to see about putting our summer place on the market; but even as I spoke to the local real estate man, I found that I had no feelings one way or another about the place. I was indifferent to price or terms, and since I was so obliging a client, the broker parted with a few pleasantries, and then said obliquely, as many New Englanders would:

“How about them fellers up on the moon?”

Those Yankees change the subject to suit them; I was talking about the house but he wanted to talk about the moon—meaning he had regard for me or that he was returning my favor of obliging him, in his peculiar Connecticut manner. He didn't care what I thought or felt about the moon; he himself felt queasy, and I wondered whether the whole world didn't feel a bit queasy.