Time Travail (9 page)

The uniformed figures started coming back.
His contraption was a primitive time machine of sorts, apparently.
But the images they induced in my mind were a million times
superior to the poor distorted ones his screen displayed, if I
could believe his description of myself pedaling away for the
Static Electricity Machine in a flickering blur. On my back,
staring up at the mottled ceiling I was able to summon up
weak-chinned Peewee Reese, shortstop, swarthy Harry Lavaghetto on
third, of course slugger Dolph Camilli on first. Wasn’t somebody
chunky called Hodges on second base? Hadn’t I got the Brooklyn
infield in the early 1940s?

For hours I safely resurrected baseball. I
couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe my hard-drive was softening but I
extracted lots of things from it tucked away for decades but saved
and available like the line-up of the unbeatable St Louis Cardinals
with their sluggers-row, the pansy Philadelphia Athletics, hitless
wonders, guided by ancient Connie Mack, a gentlemen so a loser,
into eighth place, year after year.

I even started salvaging a day in Ebbet’s
Field, good seats behind the catcher. Even a stain of mustard from
the hotdog (
HeissHund
I say
as a joke) on my scorecard which records St Louis’ two homeruns in
the third inning. Brooklyn going into the last inning has a string
of goose eggs. Now I explain the fine points to her even though she
doesn’t know the basic rules of baseball. I see her politely
intense look as I explain a double play. She must be bored, but
like so much else, doesn’t allow it to show.

I want to say I’ll teach her baseball.
“
Ich werde
dich Baseball lernen
,” I
say in my atrocious German, learned practically for her sake. She
thanks me politely, corrects the verb and adds, “Dear.” Of course
it’s not the inconceivable English word. It’s the indirect personal
object
dir
instead
of
dich
. But that
intimate form of “you” is almost as good as “dear” even though it’s
no more than a corrective echo of my verbal intimacy with her in
her unwanted language.

The crowd rises to its feet yelling. She
rises with us. She’s obediently trying to enjoy herself. Harvey
ordered her to accept my invitation to Ebbet’s Field. “Have a good
time,” he said to her and went back to his equations. She’s doing
her best. She’s a docile girl and does what Harvey tells her to
do.

***

Five

I flew back and wound up the little there was
to be wound up. I paid Mrs Philips for the two months. She was sad
to see me go but happy I’d found a much better teaching position.
That’s what I told her. I’d have had to cook up a different version
for my ex-colleagues. They wouldn’t have swallowed that. But I
didn’t intend notifying my ex-colleagues. I liked clean breaks.

I transferred my few personal belongings into
the car. Mainly books, the hi-fi, the CDs and clothing, also the
telescopic chinning-bar. I did it with a certain melancholy. It
seemed to me that a man my age ought to have accumulated more than
what could fit into a compact Ford. Shaking off the melancholy, I
tested the tight squeeze of the hi-fi components. Each had been
carefully wrapped in a blanket like a fragile baby. You couldn’t
find components of that quality on the market nowadays. They were
my most precious possession. There was something melancholy in that
thought too.

Just as I was going to get in the car and
make a clean break Marianne came into sight.

“Leaving already?” she asked in a casual tone
of voice.

There are situations where you can disguise
an intended clean break as a round-the-corner errand, picking up a
pack of cigarettes, for instance. Tens of thousands of men
disappear that way every year. That’s how the garden-crazy blonde’s
husband had vanished, according to Harvey. But you didn’t pick up
cigarettes at the wheel of a car crammed with all your worldly
possessions.

Marianne acted very casually about the
situation but I’d learned to discount that apparent nonchalance.
When she was deeply discontented – not an uncommon condition – she
never had outbursts but inbursts, far worse. Her accent was a
little more apparent than usual. That was a symptom too.

“I dropped over to recover the book I loaned
to you a few months ago,” she said. “I was going to ask for it on
Friday but you weren’t there. I waited for an hour. I urgently need
it.”

“Oh God, Marianne, I completely forgot
Friday!” She always came over at four on Friday afternoons and left
at six or seven, more often seven than six. She’d been doing it for
months and months. I hoped I looked aghast. “Something big came up
at the last moment, a kind of emergency. Had to leave for New York
on the spot. I’d have phoned to tell you not to come except we
agreed I shouldn’t ever phone.”

“
I thought you said you had forgotten
because of that big thing. Be consistent at least. I know all about
that big thing. I passed by this morning. You were out. Your
landlady told me about your so-called new job. I thought she was
going to cry, poor woman, to see you go. I need the book.
Gilbert Durand,
Les structures anthropologiques de
l’imaginaire
.”

It was somewhere in one of the cardboard boxes
underneath the CDs, the valises and the hi-fi. I told her this and
said I would mail it to her first thing on arriving. She insisted
on having it immediately and expected me to empty the contents of
the car on the sidewalk, exposing the hi-fi components to shock,
all for a book she’d never read and had no intention of reading. I
hadn’t read it myself. Had anybody?

The conversation broadened. Soon we reached
the point where I was saying that a woman of her age and charm and
looks could do better than an old wreck like me, and it ended by my
saying that it had been marvelous of course, but a terrible strain.
Harry was a colleague, if not exactly a friend at least a very
close acquaintance. That was the last thing to have said in such
circumstances.

Expressionless, she said that hadn’t
bothered me for the past year.
Old wreck?
Vieux salaud,
oui
.

I knew what
“
vieux
” meant,
was less sure about
“
salaud
”
but could guess. Dirty water?
Certainly nothing favorable. It was a bad sign when Marianne lapsed
into French. I had learned that. She added that everybody knew the
real reason for my so-called retirement.

I got into the car rapidly. As I pulled away
I said: “I’ll send it to you first thing, also a letter to explain
things a little more in detail.” It was no way to say adieu. I gave
her a little wave and regretted it. Seen from her point of view,
standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, things sort of
snatched out from under her, it must have seemed nastily breezy. I
hadn’t meant it that way.

I felt terrible about it for half an hour. I
would have felt even worse and for longer if the whole scene hadn’t
seemed a little unreal like everything else since I’d emerged from
Harvey’s cellar the day before. Her voice had seemed distant and
distorted. So had Mrs Philips’. In my head I still heard the cellar
voices. They seemed far more real. So did all the scenes they’d
summoned up, more real than the buildings and crowds at the moment
they appeared framed in the windshield of my car. Then they rushed
by and dwindled in the mirror. They vanished into the permanence of
the past.

I soon discovered that there were lots of
strings attached to the job. Practically every week I tripped over
new ones radiating out. After a while I began picturing those
strings as a spider-web and it’s easy to guess where and what I was
in relation to it in my picture.

In the letter he’d promised me $500 a week,
then in the night of the old voices $700 and finally $1,000. What I
actually collected, in humiliating circumstances, was a measly
$350. He assured me “the balance” (he didn’t specify if the balance
was $650 or $350 or just $150) would be regularly deposited in a
special account in my name and in exactly a year’s time I would get
all the money.

It was only later that I began to wonder if
getting the contents of that account wasn’t contingent on my
sticking it out with him in that decaying house for a year. Or at
least till the predictable end which, in all sincerity, I can say I
didn’t wish for.

At the beginning I did very little at
Harvey’s to justify even the little money I was drawing. I found it
hard to cope even with the elementary business of getting settled.
I spent a good part of the first week flat on my back on the bed
staring up at the dirty cracked ceiling. It was a screen for the
images the radio voices had resurrected.

It was strange allowing myself to go back
like that. I’d learned long ago to resist that indulgence.
Indulgence in the sense of giving way to desire. In a religious
sense indulgence also means remission of punishment. No punishment
was involved in visiting the past. Not yet it wasn’t. There was no
loss of control, no feeling that you couldn’t emerge from past
things if you wanted to. I didn’t really want to, as long as the
things were early and harmless. The present was a cracked ceiling
with nothing much better in the other rooms and in the streets
outside.

It was a kind of pleasant paralysis. Then one
day the memories stopped coming. I felt loss. That should have been
the alarming part only I didn’t realize it at the time. That
suddenly blank ceiling was like the screen in long-ago Saturday
popcorn matinees when the film broke in the projector. Except that
now in my solitary movie-house I couldn’t join in with the rest of
them and jeer and whistle the images back.

So I was able to get up and throw myself into
the present. I created islets of comparative cleanliness in the
house. I scrubbed my bedroom and painted it. I managed to unjam the
window. Like a teenager in his first room away from home I even
scotched up Van Gogh beach scenes and seascapes. They provided
better views than the window did. I sprinkled roach-powder in
strategic spots. I screwed the chinning-bar in the bathroom
doorframe and had the petty satisfaction one morning of seeing
Hanna with a bruised forehead. It was worth the abuse I got.

It took me a whole day just to set up my
hi-fi system and find the best positioning for the speakers. I
spent as little time as possible in the house when Harvey didn’t
need me. I took my meals in town. Twice a week he gave me long
lists of components and I would drive out to an electronics place
in Long Island City in his old Volvo station wagon with Hanna
brooding in the back seat. She was there for the muscle-work of
loading and unloading. She didn’t say a word to me. She wasn’t
talking to me and Harvey couldn’t, most of the time.

He spent all his time in the cellar working
over electronic devices he called “sensors.” Under construction
they looked, not surprisingly, like a cross between the inside of a
TV set and a computer. Supposedly they would give his machine
mobility and allow it to pull in more than ancient darkness and
voices. I nodded gravely. I told myself I didn’t believe for an
instant that it was possible to summon up old images despite his
exploit with the old radio-voices. Somehow I made a distinction
between capturing images from the past and capturing old
disincarnated voices. Didn’t my own machine do that to Caruso and
Chaliapine? My reasoning wasn’t scientific.

The only constructive work I did in the
cellar was a little soldering. He couldn’t stand the acrid fumes.
Mostly I deconstructed. I dismantled junked computers and TV sets
and stocked the components in a vast stretch of labeled
pigeonholes. There were hundreds of them. It looked like a giant
honeycomb with metal larvae in the cells.

Clearing out the cellar mess was also part of
my duties. Once a week I drove the Volvo to an industrial wasteland
and watched Hanna hurl the bulky unburnable stuff onto a junk heap.
Twice a week, rain or shine, Havey made me incinerate the
inflammable stuff in the back yard near the pylon, probably to
spite the neighbors. It made a lot of smoke. I was careful to
choose times when the wind didn’t blow it the blonde’s way. Harvey
always watched me as I kneeled before the heap of cardboard and
wood scraps with a box of kitchen matches. “Good job,” he would
croak when it caught. It was the only praise I ever got from
him.

Finally, I talked, vaguely, about the old
days. Was expected to anyhow but not vaguely. It turned out to be
an essential part of the job. I was his paid memory-booster. His
memory was riddled with blanks, he said. He blamed the hospital
people for it with their ray and chemical treatment. He made it
sound as though they were plotting against his brain instead of
trying to cure him. He explained that he’d be exploring those old
days with the machine eventually and badly needed guidance. He
spoke about sightings, agonic lines, spatio-temporal bearings, I
don’t know what else.

When I said I didn’t understand he explained
that my memories would simplify the task of navigation once the
machine became fully operational. He had to know roughly when and
where and who.

I answered his questions, more or less, as
long as they were limited to the shack days. When he tried to go
beyond them I found ways out. I said I couldn’t work and talk at
the same time. I was putting the components in the wrong
pigeonholes. He told me to stop pigeonholing and to go on talking.
So then I had to say, “I don’t remember,” over and over again to
those questions about particular people from that time, the way
they looked. I didn’t like talking about the dead. “Symptom of
age,” I’d say about my faulty memory. So we’d work on in
silence.