Time Travail (45 page)

He revolts at that inauthenticity, sacrifices
the rest of the hoard, crowns himself with the helmet set at X 9999
and inserts the second of the two time-cassettes from the burned
down house hours from fire. Forefinger on the red dispatching
button he takes a mental running start and supplies the prelude to
what he longs and fears to see.

The handsome Greek-profiled youth struggles
again down the street to the Morgenstern house, as promised, with
flapping flannel trousers, maintaining his golden hair against the
gale, practically a hurricane, assailed by skittering cans, ash-can
covers, wrenched-off branches from the roaring trees. He reaches
the front door.

The aging observer stops the mental image and
so time, leaving the other immobile, kneeling before the doormat as
in long prayer. The observer hesitates and then allows the other to
remove the key, open up and go through the dark living room. Rachel
is sitting in the sofa alongside Mr Morgenstern. It’s contamination
from an earlier memory. He reestablishes the empty living room and
allows the other to go up the stairs, allows him to go down the
dark corridor to her door, to knock and knock, to call her name. As
he pushes open the door, on the threshold now, he splices memory
and return to the authentic thing by pressing the red dispatching
button.

He survives it. The vertical blur on the
screen condenses into the handsome youth recalled a second before
on the threshold. Now beyond the threshold after all this time, the
door closed behind him, he gazes at the horizontal blur already
condensed into Rachel in pajamas, propped up against pillows, her
cat alongside her, a button-eyed doll on each side of her head. On
the side-table there are stacks of paper, pencils, a pencil
sharpener, a bottle of cough syrup and the photograph with her
parents standing in the snow and smiling for the lens, she between
them, looking up at her towering father. Sheets of paper with
equations cover her lap in disorder. A crow’s wing of dangling hair
half conceals her chalky face as she stares down at the book. She
doesn’t look up.

Now the peripheral cellar fades, also the
housing-unit of the screen and transfer occurs in color and
dimension. He is totally in that room as the golden-haired youth
approaches her. The cat’s eyes observe him cold and yellow. Going
toward her he wills stoppage of forward process. Time obediently
halts. He allows it to resume.

When the young man touches her shoulder in
timid consolation, she looks up from the book with immense eyes and
he gets a torrent of words, more than she’s ever said to him in two
years, but in German. It’s no correcting echo of his own
laboriously constructed phrases. He can’t understand a word. It
goes on and on.

He places his arm about her shoulder and sits
down on the edge of the bed, comforting her. Now he takes her in
his arms like something made of spun glass. He tries to stop
process for the promised five years in this pure joy. He gets maybe
five seconds.

Process resumes, unbearably. Looking, he
endures it as she endures it. If one or the other, let it be
electrocution, not the 1: 9999 time-ratio, not five years of this.
Random selection rescues him for a while. In great close-up the
cat, fled to a corner, stares at him with cold yellow eyes. On the
carpet now, the cracked face of the button-eyed doll. On the
bedside table the upset bottle with cough syrup oozing out over the
papers. Other sheets of paper scattered on the carpet with
incomprehensible equations, hundreds of them, an unending confusion
of symbols.

Now he returns to her, is returned to her.
What if the five-year stasis should be this: limp and weeping where
he’s carried her to the chair? On the carpet the laundry bag. He
begs and then commands her to stop weeping. Aware that it’s half
past eleven he panics at the sound of an approaching car.

He guides her back to the bed with the fresh
sheet. He notices that her pajama top was buttoned up the wrong way
in his haste but there’s no time to correct that. Quickly he says
love, love, love, for the hundredth time (but he’s visibly panicked
at her rigid mask staring up at the ceiling) and promises again to
phone her next morning. He flees with the laundry bag.

Flames arise sluggish yellow, entwined with
black smoke. Sparks shoot out, drift a little against the stars and
go out. The fire, fueled by old newspapers, is for him in a distant
lot. In the smoldering heart of it he sees the carbonized weave of
the sheet. The discolored washrag, still wet, resists. The wind
shifts and blows the acrid black smoke into his face. He coughs
violently and starts vomiting.

In the red gloom of the cellar he goes on
vomiting. It has the sour taste of wine. When he finishes and is
able to breathe he sees that the helmet’s unplugged. He’d forgotten
to plug the helmet in.

On the screen the badly faded vertical blur
starts drifting toward the horizontal blur, also badly faded. He
switches it off. He pulls the helmet off and expels everything from
his mind except the necessity of leaving the cellar. Remembering
recent cold and snow he struggles into his heavy overcoat.

He wipes his mouth with the sleeve and
stumbles up out of the cellar and out of the house into the hot
blue glare of the vast concave screen overhead. It has tremendous
blinding reality. He squints beyond the high green weeds and the
hurricane fence at the other house. A dark-haired young woman is
standing motionless at a window. On the lawn a red tricycle is half
hidden by motionless rows of pink red, yellow tulips. Everything’s
tremendously present. He tries to keep it all focused there. He
sustains it for a few seconds. Then the dark-haired young woman
raises her hand to her cheek, initiating process.

The tulips move a little in the breeze. He
thinks: they’ve come up very fast. He remembers the expert way the
woman (not this one at the window) buried the bulbs a while ago but
has trouble remembering her name. Then he realizes it was an
earlier cycle. He’s already seen them pointing up, the violet-edged
shoots, the stem bearing the sheathed flower and the slow
revelation of bloom, pink, red, yellow like now, but another now
because he’d seen them past this stage, yawning wider and wider
each day, then the fall of the petals totally baring the
pistils.

He goes back into the house, mind in
controlled blankness, a kind of delicate suspension. Sweating
heavily, he removes the winter overcoat in the living room and goes
on undressing.

He leaves his clothing in a little pile and
goes up naked into the bathroom. He brushes his teeth and then
takes a hot shower, soaping himself over and over. He tries to
shave. The light over the dirty mirror is dead. The razor’s dull.
It leaves a pattern of white beard sprinklings and blood in the
washbasin. He twists the faucet and the powerful cascade whirls it
away. He carefully dresses with wrinkled but clean things.

He soon soils them cleaning the house: vacuum
cleaner, mop, pail, scrub-brush, old shirts ripped into rags. He
concentrates on the job and maintains blankness and suspension. At
the end he has to take another shower and even shaves again with
more blood but much fewer bits of white beard in the washbasin this
time. He takes it for rejuvenation.

The phone goes on ringing for a long time.
Finally she answers in a sleepy alarmed voice. He doesn’t know what
to say, doesn’t understand why he dialed the number her son had
left. He almost hangs up. She goes on saying: who is this? Is this
Jack? Is that you Jack? That gives him a cue. He identifies himself
in a casual tone of voice. After a long silence she says,
“Wait.”

He waits a few minutes. She comes back and
asks in a less sleepy voice: why are you phoning at this time of
night? It’s not unfriendly but you couldn’t say friendly either. He
says he wouldn’t mind seeing her. Another long silence. Maybe, she
says. One of these days. No, now, he says. He would like to see her
now, she should come over right now or he’ll come over to her place
right away. He’s drowning.

She says after a while: it’s nearly three
o’clock. In the morning, she adds heavily as though she’s not sure
he knows day from night. Yes he does, he wants to assure her, she
told him that. She’s got to keep it up.

The last thing she says is that she can’t
talk at three in the morning. If he promises to behave like a human
being this time and fix himself up maybe she’ll drop in tomorrow,
but she’s not promising anything. If she does come it’ll be at
about 3:30 pm of course. Just for a few minutes. She has a date. So
maybe. But it’s no promise. She hangs up.

How had he ever behaved if not like a human
being? Hadn’t he always been a suffering human being, like everyone
else, causing suffering and suffering for it? JW hangs up and goes
to bed in hope of total and permanent reorientation the next day.
But then his mind starts losing blankness and suspension. He
imagines himself going down the cellar steps. He tries to capture
her face to be able to concentrate on it the way he concentrated on
the housecleaning. Finally he thinks he gets it.

After a while he realizes that those parted
lips and far-focused eyes are from the wrong album fifteen years
before. It’s unreal like the Penny Black, Keith on the screen, Mr
Anthony’s forgiving voice. Total and permanent reorientation seems
to depend on capturing her later, real, face.

It finally comes back. He falls asleep.

When JW opens on her the next day at the
promised time, he finds her face so radically deviated from that
recent memory of it that he almost says: “God.” It’s like a
betrayal. Simultaneously the middle-aged stranger widens her eyes
at his face and practically says: “God.” Doesn’t actually say it
but it’s all over her deviated face, no effort to politely conceal
it as he had. Irritated but trying to smile, he says that yes he’s
changed a little, but then so has she. She blinks at that.

They stand like statues, each on the other
side of the threshold. She crinkles her (suddenly familiar and
unaged) nose in distaste. It can’t be at his immediate self, not
with the third shower and clean clothes. He realizes now what must
be keeping her on the outdoor side of the threshold. He aired out
the house, all the rooms, but it’s persistent. Now she’s staring
past his legs, at the heap of yellow powder in the vestibule, he
feels sure. Irritated at that too, he remembers the dream where
she’d said he had roaches on him. But he shouldn’t hold against her
things said in a dream.

He remembers his manners and opens the door
wide, standing to one side for her to come in. “Watch your step,”
he says, the roaches still on his mind. He points at the yellowish
mound of powder. “Mounting a big campaign. They’ll be annihilated
in no time.” She still doesn’t move from her side of the threshold.
She says: “That’s old-fashioned, isn’t it? I thought they had
disposable traps now. I wouldn’t know though, I never had roaches.”
He tries to keep the conversation alive. He says: “Actually they’re
not so bad. Poor press agent. Give a roach a bad name. Like
anything else.” She searches. “Maybe so,” she concedes. He says,
“Careful: I’m not saying I’m crazy about them.” “No,” she says.

They stand there. “Come on in,” he says a
little impatiently. She doesn’t move. She says, “Couldn’t we sit
outside? It’s such a beautiful day.”

He has to get two chairs. He kicks beer
bottles aside, stamps down a patch of tall weeds and they sit down.
The sunshine pains his eyes so he sits with his back to it. She
sits facing it, unflattered, with her back to her former house. He
feels drained. He knocked himself out cleaning up the house. All
for nothing. If he had known she’d refuse to come in he’d have
mowed the grass instead. At that thought he longs for the fresh new
green smell and sees her nostalgically with her real face that
first time, weeping from frustration at Hanna’s lawn mower. He
remembers himself rescuing her like a kind of knight, mature but
athletic.

She breaks the silence by saying that you age
in two years’ time at her age. He realizes that all along she’s
been processing his opening remark about how she’d changed. Two
years? he says. They haven’t seen each other in two years? That’s
not possible. She says: not counting that time she came and rang
and rang and he’d opened up with a thing on his head and pushed her
away. Let’s not talk about that. I did that? She confirms it.
Insults too. Bitch. I said that? She says: let’s not talk about it.
JW excuses himself if it’s true and says that he hadn’t been well
then. Oh, it’s true all right, she says. Let’s not talk about it.
You said you wanted to see me. Well here I am. Yes, says JW. He
thinks for a while and adds: great to see you.

After a while she asks: did it have to be in
the middle of the night? He thinks it over and says: I didn’t
realize it was the middle of the night. That’s why I phoned you, I
guess. She doesn’t look as if she understands what he means. She
says:

“I couldn’t believe it was actually you. I’d
practically forgotten you. I washed my face to wake up. I wasn’t
sure it wasn’t a dream. I once dreamed you phoned like that. That
was a long time ago.”

“I had a dream about you too. I think it was
a dream. Did you bring me flowers once?”

“I used to. Not just once.”

“This was late at night. Very shopworn
flowers.”

“I never offered you or anyone else shopworn
flowers in all my life. I was the one who should have gotten
flowers. Fresh ones, fresh-cut roses for everything. I never got
flowers in all my life. So I didn’t get any kind of flowers from
you. Or anything else. I know what I got from you. Let’s not talk
about that.”

JW tries to tell her that he wrote three
times to apologize and to explain.