Time Travail (22 page)

He wanted other dead rooms. He kept after me
vocally and in writing. There would be money in it for her and for
me, plenty of money. It shouldn’t be hard for me to convince her
now. He made broad vulgar allusions to imagined intimacies. You’ve
got her wrapped around your finger. He didn’t say “finger.” He’d
gotten things all wrong.

The idea of time-exploring that space,
brought out into the open like that, disturbed me deeply. It
couldn’t be done, I said flatly. She’d never agree, no matter how
much money he offered her. Who could stand the company of those
multiplied Cyclops eyes whirring and tracking? Her nerves were
already fragile.

Moreover, I continued, she prided herself on
her interior decoration scheme. Her living room was all scatter
rugs and delicate glass vases and blond imitation Scandinavian
furniture. Time-sensors would be jarringly out of place in her
pastel corners. She was a superstitious woman as well. She’d
believed, all evidence to the contrary, in Indian good-luck charms,
in zodiacal signs, and maybe in the efficacy of the cross. She
wouldn’t take to necromancy.

“Necromancy. That’s summoning. The dead.
We’re not summoning. The dead. We’re bringing back. The
living.”

He added that in any case she wasn’t to be
told what the sensors really did. I should never do that. He was
confident I could cook up a plausible explanation unless I’d
radically changed from my younger days.

When one day he demanded (a practical
ultimatum) that I submit the proposal to her that very evening I
tried to come up with an alternative strategy. If he could manage
with a single sensor instead of the present four then conceivably
it could be smuggled into a gift, a sizable decorative object,
something bulky, maybe a statue with the sensor within, a 19th
century Negro groom thing, for example, with the lens masquerading
as one of the goggling eyes.

Impossible, he said: there had to be four of
them. Anyhow the lens whirred and visibly moved about. Goddam it,
Jerry, leave the technical side to me. He’d have shouted if he’d
been able to. Invent a reason, he commanded.

He overestimated my powers of invention, I
said, thinking of the recent bathroom fiasco. That, like so many
other things, had been eroded by time. Why not tell her the truth
about what the sensors really did? She might be flattered to
participate in an historic time-experiment.

I suggested this because I was certain at
first that she would refuse. I suspected she’d be deeply alarmed to
learn that diachronically, in vertical cross-section, her living
room was as crowded as the IRT 42nd St station at 6:00 pm. Then,
too late, at the very moment I submitted the idea I wondered if
after all she mightn’t accept the presence of the sensors in her
living room in the hope of recuperating her son normal and her
husband loving, if only in the form of shadows.

Fortunately, Harvey rejected the idea, as
explosively as he could. I hadn’t been opening my mouth to her, had
I? I didn’t like his tone and choice of words and felt like telling
him so. I said, of course not, I hadn’t spoken a word about them to
her.

Just to say something, I asked him how much
money he was prepared to pay for the sensors to be set up in her
house. He told me the sum.

The sum for her.

The sum for me.

A talking-session was scheduled – as he knew
– the very day I learned what it was worth to him to get those
sensors into the space Beth Anderson’s house intruded on.

I was apprehensive about it (the tutorial)
but she opened the door all dressed up for class as usual and
smiling. She’d digested the flash-shot in the shower-unit. She was
even a little apologetic about the headache that had abridged the
last session. She was that way, I was discovering: quick to flare
up, quick to feel guilt about it.

As usual, we drank and chatted before getting
down to business. I steered clear of The Golden Galaxy.

I didn’t position her for it. She positioned
herself. It began by her complaining about the noise that night
which had been particularly bad.

“I know I ought to be tolerant and all, but
it’s crazy at that time of night, he must be insane!”

Immediately I said that, well, maybe not
insane but certainly more than a little peculiar. Sometimes he
reminded me of my grandmother on my father’s side. In the last
years, I said, she used to throw dollar-bills out of the window. I
wasn’t positioning her for it, not consciously I wasn’t, even
though money was central to the perfectly authentic anecdote.

“Don’t tell me he does that!”

“Manner of speaking,” I said evasively,
retreating from it now. “No, he’s not completely normal, poor
Harvey.”

“Poor me you mean. Oh I realized he wasn’t
normal a long time ago. Hounding me day and night for me to sell my
house. I had to leave the phone off the hook to get some sleep. I
even threatened to call the police though they say he’s got the
police in his pocket.”

It wasn’t thought out. It was like a fencer’s
arm autonomously exploiting a split-second opening:

“He’s still got a thing about your house.
Only this time he doesn’t talk about a purchase. He talks about a
rental. All the time.”

It was like my feet that morning five months
before, autonomously heading me to the bank with his check. Money
had been central to that too. She laughed.

“He wants to rent my house now? With that
awful woman too? Where am I supposed to live?”

“As far as I can understand, people wouldn’t
be involved in the rental. You’d go on living here. It’s for a
device. He wants to rent a spot in your house for a device.”

“A device? What kind of a device? Is it a big
device?”

“Size is a relative concept. They’re
knee-highish, say.” I didn’t add: knee-highish to an elephant.

“They? I thought you said there was just one
device.”

“In a sense there is. It’s the same device
but multiplied four times. A little like quadraphonic speakers. As
a matter of fact they look a little like speakers. Make less noise
though. Forget about it.”

“Noise? They make noise too? He must be out
of his mind.”

“Pretty far out. And it’d be so easy to take
advantage of him in that condition. It’s pathetic, actually. It’s
like that grandmother of mine. He says he’s willing to give you
$20,000 if you keep them in your house for a while.”

She echoed the sum in astonishment, reflected
and then asked suspiciously what was so special about her
house.

I told her it wasn’t the house, he didn’t
care about the house. It was the ground the house was standing on
apparently.

“Buried treasure?”

“Nothing like that. Nothing commercially
exploitable like oil or gold either. Telluric waves. Whatever that
is. Your house occupies a nodal point, it seems.”

She reflected again for longer. “Could they
be covered up with a cloth? Not that I’m tempted.”

“Maybe if you made holes for the lenses.”

“Lenses?”

I explained that it was for the telluric
waves. She stepped back from the whole thing at that. She didn’t
see how lenses fitted in with invisible waves. I didn’t myself. She
could be pretty sharp sometimes. She also said she didn’t
understand the business about telluric waves in the first place.
Hadn’t I told her he was working on a machine to cure himself of
his illness?

When I replied that he had more than one
string to his bow, that he took himself for some kind of universal
genius like Leonardo da Vinci, that he worked simultaneously on
different things, she blinked and said nothing. The silence
lengthened. Didn’t she find my answers too glib?

“Forget it, it’s all craziness,” I said and
pushed the bottle out of the way and unclasped my black briefcase
to get to safe things.

Everything went radically wrong then.

It was sheer carelessness on my part. I’d
been late for the talking session and had grabbed the black
briefcase without looking inside. I did notice that it was
unusually heavy for something as lightweight as Steinbeck but
supposed it was a bottle. When I took everything out of the
briefcase the blue box containing her son’s poems was revealed. I
remembered having stuck it there the day before while cleaning to
get it out of the way.

Her face switched on.

I said, “Still working on them,” shoved it
back in the briefcase and took out
Of Mice and Men
.

Her face switched off.

Half an hour later I excused myself and went
to the bathroom, the ground floor one this time. The last time I’d
visited a bathroom in her house things had gone very badly.

It was much worse this time.

The first thing I saw when I returned was her
rigid back and then the blue box before her, opened for the first
time since it had been in my possession. The poems, like a royal
mummy, were protected by a sealed kraft envelope further protected
by criss-crosses of scotch-tape. Her face was as rigid as her back.
I said, “Ah.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You didn’t read them at all. You didn’t
savor a single one.”

I recalled the pitiless priority she gave to
sincerity. I was absolutely sincere now when I explained that those
poems had seemed to mean so much to her, that I hadn’t wanted to
wound her with the truth, that it was something I had trouble lying
about. Call it a private code. Or a phobia. I’d had certain bad
experiences I’d rather not talk about.

I couldn’t talk about the Bulgarian woman.
Could I talk about the repetition of the experience twenty years
later with my closest pal, gentle Marty Stein in the hospital,
leaden-faced and terminal? He’d alluded to a secret activity. I
thought it was clandestine women. It turned out to be clandestine
poetry for the past two years since he’d learned how ill he was.
Would I mind reading them and telling him the truth? Oh, it wasn’t
the truth he wanted, not about his sojourn in the hospital and not
about his poems either, bits of survival for him. Who wants the
truth about anything?

So I didn’t tell him the truth about his
poems. I couldn’t condemn him to total void. For hours every day
for three weeks I recited those poems at his bed-side and had to
invent quiet sincere-sounding things like: “It’s beyond analysis,
Marty, like, I don’t know, certain chamber music, that Mozart viola
and violin duo, you know the one: dum-dum-dee-da-da.”

Day after day. He went out with that. I wept
for my best friend out of grief and guilt for relief. My dead
suffocate me. It was nothing to talk about to a practical stranger
even in justification.

“It’s something I simply can’t lie about, it
takes too much out of me,” I repeated.

“
But you
did
lie about it saying you’d savored them.” She was very close
to tears. “And how could you know they’re bad? How can you possibly
know that? You haven’t even read them.”

I was being hounded. What right did she have
ferreting in my briefcase? I took the folder and started attacking
the criss-cross of scotch-tape, saying: “I wanted to spare you and
myself.” She started to say something. I cut her off. “Please say
nothing until I’ve finished,” I said imperiously.

I had the pile between my clenched fists and
plunged a little theatrically into the first of the things. It was
like a high drum-rolled circus dive into a tub of water. I was
aware of the uncompromising set of my features, my knotted brows
and tight lips (didn’t it age me?) and I felt the balance between
us shifting back. She was gazing at me with the old timidity. She
sat down at a safe distance on the sofa, on the very edge, like a
job-applicant.

The atmosphere was electric with her anxiety
as sheet after sheet went into their appropriate pile. Time went
by. Once she started to say something again. I cut it off instantly
with a curt palm-forward gesture without looking up from the sheet.
Once she approached the table and softly placed a glass on it. I
frowned at the soft clink of the bottle’s neck against the glass,
the gurgle. Dying for it I pushed it away. Nothing must be allowed
to disturb the painful totality of my attention was what I wanted
to convey. I couldn’t help hamming it up. I remembered again the
quality she prized most.

Back on her sofa, she now had a magazine open
on her lap and turned the pages but I felt her eyes on me.
Sometimes she would get up and tiptoe about the place,
straightening out this and that. Once the phone rang and she sprang
for it and whispered (to a certain Johnny) that she’d take the call
on the bedroom phone.

Later in a pause as I was reaching for
another poem and still wondering who Johnny could be, she
whispered: “Do you want to eat something?” By then the whole
afternoon had gone by. I shook my head briefly. Soon she had to
turn the lights on.

“OK,” I finally said, took a deep breath,
slowly expelled it and leaned back.

I let another minute go by, visibly
concentrating on correct formulation.

“Get this straight. He’s no Keats.”

That was to place my remarks under the sign
of forthrightness, pitiless frankness, so she wouldn’t question the
veracity of what I’d saved up for her out of compassion, number two
on her list of virtues.

It was a mistake. She wouldn’t even concede
that he was no Keats. She said that he was only fifteen when he
wrote some of those poems.

It was a bad start. She didn’t yield an inch
when it came to that son of hers.

I didn’t answer. In the silence she stared
down at her pale blue carpet. Don’t look like that.

“I’ve sorted them into three piles as you can
see.”

She didn’t look up. I went on with the
forthright strategy.