Time Travail (28 page)

But during the period of archeological
research I paid less attention to her vertebras. She hinted gently
at a slackening of tenderness on my part. Occasionally she’d clasp
her hands behind her neck and concede brief access to her
rejuvenated breasts. She often asked me if I had something on my
mind. I invariably answered yes but she protected it too well. At
that she would breathe deeply, squeeze my hand hard and intensify
kisses and caresses and became less and less real while I went on
displacing shops and buildings in my head. It was a bad
symptom.

It was a bad symptom that reality for me on
that bed alongside the half-naked woman was long-ago things some of
which I’ll enumerate now but not compulsively and without peril
this time I think since I’m on my guard, aware, as I wasn’t enough
then, of the trap.

So, marking my distance from them, holding on
to here and now (which is a dark and dank cellar with the pattering
of rats and the bite of the time-helmet on my forehead) I recall
recalling the primitive grocery-store in the days before the moving
black belt and bar-codes, the clear music of the old-time
cash-register, recall embracing the big 100% biodegradable Kraft
paper-bag with the saw-toothed top tickling my nose and placed the
grocery-store on the site of the present video-shop.

I recall recalling the scarred
bloodstained butcher’s chopping block, concave over the years from
the cleaver, the hooked carcasses of sane bovines, and that had to
be the brand-new bank. Next door (so the computer-store now) the
great pants-press lowered with a hiss of billowing steam and a
smell of mildew. Much more pleasant was the fragrance of fresh-cut
pine-boards from the lumber-store which was haunting the present
travel agency. I saw Cohen’s candy-store and outside the soda-drink
chest with the built-in bottle-opener and the pattern of
bottle-caps on the sidewalk, Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up, Canada Dry, lots of
others I could enumerate but won’t. The furniture-store surely.
There’s the taciturn Italian shoe-repairman in his heavy leather
apron bent over an archaic machine with leather belts making
slapping sounds.
Choice Nuts and Dried Fruit
now?

I see the barbershop pole, the giant red-and-white
revolving peppermint-stick, an antiquity even then. She went there
instead of to the fancy beauty parlor with the women in their
ranked electric chairs. She had a practical boyish cut that
emphasized her white neck. I knew when she went and sometimes in
the mirror she saw me looking through the window and stared
solemnly at me, frowning a little and then smiling a little and
then frowned and looked away. Harvey was waiting his turn reading a
paper along with the other men.

Out of it. I don’t know where to place it. I
didn’t know where to place the barbershop I would tell Harvey if he
asked.

When I submitted my tentative location of the
old places I thought my job was over. No, there was another piece
of research even more unreasonable than the first. He expected me
to come up with everybody’s shopping-habits in those days: the
stores, the days, the time. He didn’t individualize “everybody.” I
understood: himself, myself, my mother and father, his mother and
father, maybe his grandparents. He should have known for his own
people and himself but he didn’t. It was his memory again, he said
and added that if it kept on worsening he’d stop the chemical and
ray treatment.

There were no libraries or local papers to
consult for the ancient shopping habits of obscure people. Most of
the individuals involved were beyond consultation. I was supposed
to make a deep cerebral plunge and come up with the precious
time-barnacled information. Was the big shopping day Friday
afternoon or Saturday morning?

So now I knew what he was after, always the
same thing. I should have understood far earlier what with the
relay he’d constructed and the reduced second-generation sensors.
He’d been preparing this alternate strategy for months now to
bypass Beth Anderson’s inaccessible house. I wasn’t really alarmed
at first. Rooms were a concentrate of past people in private
attitudes. How could the machine help picking them up? But on
sidewalks outside shops they would be safely public and diluted
among the thousands of other passersby.

Anyhow I finally came up with what I thought
had been the old schedule for my mother and his. They’d shopped
together. His father’s I didn’t know, he’d been on the road most of
the time. For the days we both went there it was easy, mainly
Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. I handed him the paper. He
glanced at it for a second. He stared at me.

“You got. Everybody down?”

“Everybody I can remember.”

“Where’s …?” He broke off and seemed to be
searching for a name.

“Where’s Rachel?” he said finally and I
recalled that night the year before when she came back and I
couldn’t remember her name either. Couldn’t.

“Why Rachel?” I asked as if I didn’t know
why.

“Didn’t she go. Shopping too? Get her hair
fixed? Dresses dry-cleaned? Malted milks? Movie? Dentist?”

“I forgot about her.”

“You forgot about Rachel?”

“I don’t remember when she went into
town.”

“Try to remember.”

So I said I’d try to remember.

One of the ways I tried not to remember was
by keeping my mind sharply focused on housework when Beth was away.
But I found I couldn’t do jobs like vacuum cleaning in the old
vehement way. They’d become mechanical chores that didn’t require
exclusive mental focus. Focus shifted to old things. It was an
unhealthy situation.

One morning as the whine of the vacuum
cleaner died away into developing silence I decided to launch into
some challenging big-scale project. I wandered all over her silent
house.

Couldn’t the upstairs corridor stand
repainting? In the storeroom I found everything for the preliminary
job of washing: sponges, rags, pails, even neatly tied stacks of
newspapers, some yellowed and a decade old. I avoided looking at
them as I spread them out on the floor. The stepladder proved to be
too short for comfort. I hunted around but couldn’t find a bigger
one. Then I thought of the locked room at the end of the corridor.
She’d called it a junk-room.

I finally found a big bunch of keys on top of
the refrigerator. The next-to-the-last one on the ring opened the
door with difficulty.

The room was dim and unbearably stuffy. It
was empty except for a cot in the corner. I pulled up the Venetian
blinds in a cloud of dust. I nearly ruptured myself trying to open
the window. Defeated, I sat down on the cot and thought of the
bedroom in the other house, how it had been dusty and suffocating
like this room that first night (the night of the old voices) and
how I hadn’t been able to force the window up there either. That
gave me the idea of doing to this room what I’d done to the other.
I gave up the idea of painting the corridor.

It took three days of clandestine work to
transform the junkless junk room. An hour before Beth’s return I’d
lock the door, air out the corridor and take a shower with her
perfumed soap.

On the third day as I was doing the second
coat on the ceiling I glanced at the window and surprised Hanna
dimly staring at me from her bedroom window in the other house.
She’d made two clean circles in the dirty panes for her eyes.

When she left, probably to inform Harvey,
those two circles went on staring at me. I let the blinds down.

The evening of the surprise I held Beth by
the waist and guided her down the corridor past her bedroom, past
the bathroom. Where are we going? Not there, Jerry, it’s locked. I
tell you it’s locked. I lost the key. I know it’s locked, she
protested.

I opened the door and practically had to
force her inside with me. She seemed to be on the verge of tears. I
understood then that something had happened in that room. I was
sure it had involved her son. With my experience I could imagine
what it was. I tried to convince her that she shouldn’t live in the
past all the time. I told her that whatever had happened here was
the past. The only reality of this room, I said, was the two of us
seated on this cot, me kissing her cheek. I soothed her into
sitting on the edge, stiff, upright. Look! I commanded. I got up
and pulled the blinds up, like pulling a sheet off a statue, to
reveal the room in new sunny glory and saw Harvey across the way
standing dimly at the bedroom window, staring at me, past me,
through two clean circles in the dirty panes, half a foot under
Hanna’s. He looked as though the revelation had been for him.

I slanted the slats till he vanished. The
evening sunshine tigered everything in the room now. Look, I said:
a brand-new room. I said I’d junk the old cot and buy another one.
I did it the next day. Even so she refused to stay in the room more
than a minute. But during the next fire drill she told me to go
upstairs and lock myself in that room till the all clear. So it
served a useful purpose after all.

By this time Harvey had finished the work on
the second-generation sensors (with a slew of bits and scraps I had
to burn three days running in the garden). They had mobility now,
he said. The word “mobility” was an overstatement. It depended on
who was active behind them. Each was double the size and weight of
a car storage battery. But we had Hanna’s brawn to grunt and fart
them in and out of the Volvo.

His real achievement was a powerful relay
that filled a third of the station wagon. It was more or less
effective within a radius of half a mile of the machine in the
cellar. I was cheered when he said we would be operating at the
extreme limit of the relay’s pick-up zone and added that nothing
could be done about that.

The four new sensors were connected to the
relay in the car by cables that Harvey instructed me to paint
pavement-gray in the interest of inconspicuousness. But it struck
me as useless cosmetics with four outlandish machines marking out
the area of time-search on the sidewalk in front of busy shops.
Finally Harvey realized that body snatching would have to be done
at lonely hours. Not even mid-morning would do. He chose six in the
morning.

Of course earlier wouldn’t have posed
technical problems. In midnight blackness the sensors could capture
old sunlight. But operating in the dead hours of the morning might
seem suspicious to the police who cruised about the neighborhood
regularly since a recent spate of burglaries and two rapes.

So operating time was to be six in the
morning: the beginning of honest daylight and nobody around to ask
questions.

On the eve of the chosen day he impressed on
Hanna and me the importance of going to bed early in order to rise
and shine at five. The beat-up hearse-like Volvo was packed with
the relay, the four sensors, a junked and reconverted portable TV
that would enable Harvey to monitor the images from the back-seat
and videotape them, the video device itself, the prototype of a
time-storage unit, a portable control-panel extemporized from a
salvaged length of pine-board, spare cables and tubes, a
tool-chest. There were even three chocolate-bars for early-morning
hunger.

But the Volvo didn’t budge next morning.
Hanna had been secretly late-late viewing in her room and at 5:00
am couldn’t be moved, no more than Boulder Dam. By the time she
emerged, snarling, it was already seven-thirty and the outing had
to be postponed.

The next scheduled day it was Harvey himself
who overslept and Hanna strangled with laughter from the top of the
cellar stairs. Even that didn’t rouse him. She wanted me to go down
and wake him up to enjoy her triumph immediately but I told her to
let him go on sleeping. It would do him good, I added, eating my
cake and having it too.

The third day they were both ready on time
and hammered on my door. I didn’t answer. Harvey came in. I was
sick, I said and turned toward the wall. He harassed me. I’m sick,
I said. Leave me (I felt like saying “us”) alone. He went on and
on. Finally I turned around and sat up in bed.

For the first time I made a fundamental
criticism of what he was doing. I didn’t trust myself to speak
about what was really troubling me. I kept the criticism on a
dispassionate theoretical level. All of the people he was trying to
resurrect were nobodies to the world at large, I said. I pretended
to be revolted at the wasted financial and cultural possibilities
of the machine. Why didn’t he record past presidential turpitudes
and sell the images to the TV networks? There was a fortune in
that. Or he could summon up great men, we could see W. A. Mozart in
conversation with J. Haydn or if not that, doing anything, playing
billiards even.

He glanced at his watch impatiently but maybe
because he could never resist theoretical speculation he accepted
that hypothesis. Very seriously he said that what I’d suggested was
within the realm of possibility. If he worked on it there was no
theoretical barrier to extending the range of the machine to two
hundred years in the past, it was a question of more tubes, more
power. You’d need lots more power for that though, a small city’s
power plant. And of course the machine would have to be the size of
a cathedral and rebuilt on the site of that Vienna house or
wherever it had been. But all that would take time and time was
what he didn’t have.

He went back to harassing me and finally
said:

“Don’t you want to see …?”

Once again his face went blank with the
effort to recall the name.

“Don’t you want to see Rachel?”

He’d already written the question, the night
of the old voices but had never uttered it. I didn’t want to see
any of them anymore, I said, diluting her in the others. I said I’d
already seen his mother and didn’t want to see my mother and father
that way. I had my own images of everybody, a hundred times more
real and flattering than his poor gray caricatures. I called them
up when I liked, not often (and that was my fault), but when I did
they were more faithful, a million times more, to what those people
had really been than his images were.