Time Travail (30 page)

She consented to total nudity, not enough. At
first there was the sharpness of shielding elbows and knees.
Finally she went limp. It proved contagious. Her head was turned
away from me on the pillow. Her eyes remained wide open and staring
far away, as on that sharp-focussed nude photograph her husband had
taken fifteen years before. I saw her with her arms raised,
brushing her hair, sharp-nippled, the spotlight firing her
honey-colored fleece. Suddenly enabled, I worked unassisted to
solitary climax, telling her over and over again how much I loved
her.

After, she wept quietly but persistently. I
had to tell her to stop and to please never do that again. She went
on. I turned away from her on the cot. I was voided of that faint
fire. I’d returned the present she’d given me. I was paralyzed by
sudden black depression. I felt like crying myself, at my age. Did
I? After a while I felt her hand timidly on my cheek. She turned
toward me and took my head in her bare arms and pressed it against
her chest. She began silently rocking my head, consoling me for
what I’d done to her.

***

Fifteen

The next day I helped Hanna unload the
machines from the Volvo. Harvey was still lying motionless on the
sofa in the dead room. We asked him if he wanted the new sensors
set up as the old ones had been before. He didn’t answer. We set up
the old ones, like toys for a sick child.

An hour later she went up to the threshold
and told him it was time for the hospital. She had to repeat it
three or four times. Finally he whispered that it was time but that
there would be no more treatments. I was expecting the usual
dramatics but long before it reached that stage he got up and
followed her to the Volvo, obedient and indifferent.

When they came back, much earlier than usual,
she cursed Harvey and the doctors between sobs. He’d refused the
treatment. She was enraged at the doctors for not overpowering him
and forcing him to submit to it. It came out that she’d been an
attendant in a psychiatric hospital and there they did overpower
patients for treatment. Was that where they’d met? She begged me to
convince him to keep up the treatment. They said he might not last
more than a few months if he didn’t. I did what she asked, what
else could I do?

We got no response. He didn’t go down even
once to the cellar and the machine. He inhabited the dead room now,
slept on the sofa, ate there when he did eat. When he spoke it
wasn’t to us.

Then it was Friday again. Five o’clock went
by uneventfully. Just as it had the Friday before. At half-past
five I stopped at the threshold of the dead room. I asked Harvey
how he was feeling and reminded him that I hadn’t been paid for the
last two weeks. He was still lying on the sofa. He stared in my
direction but didn’t seem to see or hear me. The next time I went
past the door there was a scrawled message on the threshold. “You
took the blueprint. I want it back.”

I asked him: what blueprint? and spoke about
the salary again. He didn’t answer. When I went past again there
was another message on the threshold: “Go down in the cellar. See
if you can find it there.” I said I’d see about that later maybe
but first I wanted to be paid for the past two weeks. Actually, I
had no intention of going down in the cellar ever again or crossing
over into the dead room.

An hour later Hanna told me to come with her
to the tiny payment room. He’d given the green light but he didn’t
attend the ceremony. I’d forgotten the two plastic bags, one for
the bills, the other, much sturdier, for the coins. So I had to
stuff the bills in one pocket and deposit three pounds of coins in
the other.

I walked towards the cellar-door lopsided. It
was a compromise. I went halfway down the stairs. No further. It
was cold and dank even there. I peered about for a blueprint down
in the red gloom below. Blackprint actually. In that light, blue
would show up black. I didn’t see anything. I was about to turn
back when I started sneezing. I couldn’t stop. I pulled my
handkerchief out of my pocket and maybe a pound of silver with it.
The coins cascaded down the steps and rolled about on the cement
floor below. I hesitated a second and then went after them very
fast. No more than twenty seconds, I said, and held my breath
between sneezes as though I were going down into poisonous gas. I
kneeled and ran, sneezed, kneeled and ran, sneezed, grabbing them
up.

I saw three quarters and a half-dollar lying
near the lead-plated door and then saw the unfolded blueprint, half
of it sticking out beneath the door.

I crouched low as against enemy fire and
raised my arm to protect my forehead. Still holding my breath, I
dashed for it. On the way back I snatched at the half-dollar with
my free hand. I missed it, but not the rough cement. I lunged up
the stairs out of range and then out of the cellar.

I pushed dirty dishes to one side and spread
out the ruin on the kitchen table. The paper was limp and ragged.
The folds were rifts bridged by yellowed Scotch tape. Even in the
conventional light of the kitchen it wasn’t really blue, just the
memory of blue like the milky blue of blind eyes. You could hardly
make out the rooms under the blotches. The legend was absolutely
illegible. It seemed to have been exposed to decades of sun and
rain. I knew immediately it couldn’t possibly be the blueprint of
the Anderson house.

Then of what other house? How could it
possibly be that? How could he have come up with it forty years
after the fire? Where could he have found it? Everything had gone
up in the house.

A sheet of paper was clipped to the other
side of the blueprint.

The colliding houses again but in new
overlap.

The repainted guest room I’d revealed to him
that day was encircled in red.

There was no question mark on this version of
overlap, the definitive one, then.

But how could he know the space of the guest
room had once been (still was) occupied by Rachel’s bedroom? How
could he read sense into an illegible blueprint? I told myself it
was like the sense he made of the jerking posthumous figures on the
screen, claiming to have seen them as they’d been when alive, with
eyes.

But wasn’t there more to it than
self-delusion? Wasn’t he trying to involve me in his crazy vision?
Because of course he’d sent me down to the cellar for that
dangerously positioned blueprint knowing I’d look at it and see the
definitive localization of his obsession. He must have imagined it
was mine too. Projection was a characteristic of sick minds, I
knew. The blueprint was somehow a lure. I had trouble formulating
the thing clearly.

I saw the lab below full of black cables
crisscrossing like a giant spider-web. I went back to the beginning
with questions I should have asked myself then. He’d lured me here
with that check. How had he known I’d retired practically
penniless? Been retired. Did he know about that too? Who’d told him
that?

I recalled an incident a few weeks before. My
pocket address-book was missing. I suspected Hanna. Breathing
through the mouth I went into her chaotic room. I didn’t find it.
On the table I saw the key to the filing cabinet where she kept my
signed salary receipts. Maybe there were other things concerning me
there. For instance information about the mysterious salary
account. So I went to the tiny room and opened the filing cabinet
and looked in the file marked JW. I found nothing on the mysterious
salary account.

But I did find a sheet of paper with the
names and addresses and phone-numbers of lots of people I’d known,
some from way back. None had been friends, some not even friendly,
at least not at the end. I didn’t know what to think about
that.

There were other troubling things, like the
promise of a salary absurdly disproportionate to the work I did for
him. Anybody could have dismantled junked TV sets and computers for
him, even dim-witted Hanna. Not everybody could have been his
memory-booster, that was true. But did he really need me for that?
Was his memory really as bad as he claimed? He’d recalled the
blue-mice episode and the details of what he’d said to me then,
thirty years before. He’d accurately recalled distant shack
episodes.

For some reason he wanted to keep me here. To
make sure I didn’t leave he’d placed a percentage of the promised
salary into an account I’d never seen and which might well be pure
invention. Like the promised legacy.

I saw myself as the victim of obscure
manipulations. It went on and on in my mind until I thought of
Harvey sniffing spies everywhere and accusing the hospital people
of sabotaging his memory. I saw myself in the dead room, imitating
him, avoiding non-existent furniture, addressing non-existent
people. I remembered Hanna predicting his end for me and later
coming after me as she did with Harvey, the way she must have done
to the inmates of her hospital, maybe Harvey too then.

So I pulled back from parallel paranoia. I
folded the blueprint up and went to the dead room where he was
still lying motionless on the sofa. His eyes were closed. As I
placed the blueprint on the threshold I noticed tiny red whorls on
the milky blind blue. I’d scraped my fingertips raw on the cement
floor trying to recover the coins. I went over to Beth’s house and
the room in the red circle.

“You look awful,” was the first thing she
said from the threshold when she got back hours later and stared at
me lying on the cot in the newly painted room. “You’ve been in that
house again. Don’t say you haven’t. I can tell.” I confessed I had.
Doing what in that house? she wanted to know. I’d already told her
I had no more work there. Listening to music. Couldn’t you do that
here? Bring your records over here. I know, you don’t think my
hi-fi’s good enough. It doesn’t make that much difference, does it?
I want you to keep out of that house, Jerry. You keep clear of that
house.

She called it the “honored-guest room” now
instead of the junk-room. She was a little less afraid to step
inside. I think she’d ended by half-believing what I’d told her
that day, that it was a new room now, that the past was the past.
She fixed it up for me. She cannibalized other rooms for a carpet,
a lamp, an armchair and a bookcase for my books which I brought
over from the other house. She got rid of the Venetian blinds and
put up curtains. The room was constantly filled with very slightly
shopworn flowers she brought back from work.

The consecration occurred when I bore up to
that room with infinite care my components as she’d reluctantly
suggested I do. Wherever my hi-fi and CDs and old vinyls were was
home, I told her.

Of course it’s home, she said. Only, whenever
she wasn’t there I was to keep the room locked up, also play the
music very low and never answer the phone or open the front door if
somebody rang. A few hours later I also learned that the room was
open to me only for daytime and evening uses and that those uses
didn’t include what she’d passively done once (been half-forced to
do) on the cot.

She was surprised I was always lying on my
back there when she came back from work. She pulled me out of it by
her presence, not knowing she did that. Sometimes I was relieved.
Sometimes not. She wondered if I was ill. I said no, just a little
tired from jogging. Actually I hadn’t left the room all day long. I
couldn’t speak to her about it. I can’t think of it now. I
mustn’t.

There were safeguards. Sometimes they worked.
I’d superimpose the burned-down house onto this bigger one. I’d try
to persuade myself that the room where I was lying couldn’t
possibly correspond spatially with the other room, that it occupied
old never-built space and I almost saw the room (this one, Beth’s)
traversed by the transient inhabitants of that space, birds from
earlier time-levels, lightning-quick tits, thousands of them. All
those birds in the small space was suffocating.

There was another safeguard, a trick which
sometimes worked when it got too real. I’d get rid of her in memory
the way I had (thought I had) in reality decades before, kneeling
on white tiles before a toilet and shredding the only photo I had
of her and watching the fragments whirling down and away in that
vulgar vortex.

The third and least ineffective of the
safeguards was imagining Beth and me on a big empty beach.

Once I thought that Harvey had switched the
machine on. Somehow it reanimated the dead here. I went over to the
other house to make him stop. I found him lying on the dead room
sofa with the sensors immobile. Not those lenses but his eyes were
slowly moving about the space of the room.

Back on the new cot in the newly painted room
in his own rigid position I thought of the old Ruhmkorff, buzzing
away like a rattlesnake, the expanding and collapsing magnetic
field of the primary coil inducing high-tension current in the
captive secondary coil, those mile-long windings of fine copper
wire. For a few minutes I imagined that his brain was generating
that time-field, inducing those old memories in mine. Some of his
memories couldn’t be so different to start with.

One afternoon the safeguards didn’t work. I
couldn’t imagine us (Beth and me) on an empty beach.

The thousands of birds didn’t visit the room
to stave off the other things in the room.

Again I kneeled on the white tiles as before
a porcelain idol and reduced her to shreds, not her, but the blank
back of the photo I’d been careful to hold face down in order not
to hurt her a second time. Still, a fragment of her mouth turned up
at the last whirling moment, also an eye, a bit of her white neck.
There was that temptation to plunge my hand into it and salvage
something of her, resisted then, the temptation, but not resisted
forty years later in imagination and so I did plunge my hand after
her and then arm and shoulder and then all of me sucked down into
the vortex as it’s trying to happen now.