#5
Once I was over at your place when your father came back from the road with presents for Rachel. That day I took Rachel to the movies, for the first time I think. There were two other times later. She’d have preferred going with you I think but you didn’t like movies and had work and you told her to go with me instead. I don’t remember the year or the month but it was a hot day. Everybody was sweating except Rachel. The picture starred Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. I don’t remember the title.
(A long hoot announces his coming. No one moves in the living room. “Your father, Harvey,” says Mrs Morgenstern over her crossword. Harvey goes on reading. Rachel puts her book aside and waits, a little stiffly. A car door slams. The front door bangs shut.
Now he’s in the living room, filling it, a squat ungrammatical blare of a man looking ill-shaven five minutes after a shave. His fat wet lips are perpetually wrapped around a cigar. He smells of cigars, after-shave lotion and sawdust. He reminds you of a parody of Edward G. Robinson in a gangster role.
“Wheeew!” he deflates loudly, conveying exhaustion from a week on the road. Rachel instantly stands up. I do too, more slowly. He goes over to his wife. They peck. “Good, Morris?” “So-so.” “Pickled tongue and mashed potatoes,” she says. He grunts with satisfaction and raises his hand to Harvey. “Einstein,” he says. Harvey looks up, nods, returns to his book. Mr Morgenstern glances at the two books on the table I’ve procured for Harvey. Then he shakes my hand silently with intent to impress. Like many small men he puts all his force in it. I know he doesn’t like me.
Now that he’s disposed of us he turns to Rachel. He’s crazy about her. He tells everybody that, including her. He calls her “Rachie” and makes her call him “Uncle Morris” even though the blood relationship is more diluted than that. She submits to his bear hug. Now he holds her at arm length and praises her beauty, an exaggeration. She stares down at the carpet and blushes into beauty now. He makes her show him her school marks. She stares down at the carpet again. It looks like more modesty but I know it’s shame. She’s just a strong B student. He gazes at her marks as at jewels.
“Jesus, we got two geniuses in the family now. One of them beautiful too. Don’t get a swelled head, Harvey, I don’t mean you.”
Now he goes through his routine. Harvey’s told me about it. I witness it for the first time. He freezes, mouth open, smites his forehead with the heel of his hand and leaves the room. He comes back a second later with a fancy bouquet and a gift-wrapped box for her. She rewards him with another blush and a little O! for the flowers and soon another little O! for the chocolates. Then she gets a vase and transforms the flowers into a collective offering on the living room table. She does the same thing with the chocolates. Mr Morgenstern looks vaguely dissatisfied. I feel sorry for him and want to tell her to be kind to him and accept his presents for herself.
He starts talking about the war which is going well seen from Forest Hill and says that if pressing a button could do it he’d exterminate the Germans, all of them, men, women and children. He means it as another present for Rachel. Mrs Morgenstern has trouble getting him off the subject.
Breaking the silence, as Mr Morgenstern removes his shoes from his aching feet, Rachel timidly asks Harvey if he’ll help her with her father’s book. “You haven’t got the mathematical base,” he says. “You should go out a little, Rachel,” says Mrs Morgenstern. “All work and no play.” “Go to the movies with Jerry,” says Harvey, an order, not a suggestion. Mrs Morgenstern seconds that motion. Mr Morgenstern looks frustrated. “If Rachie wants to go to the movies why don’t she go with Harvey?” “Morris, you know Harvey never goes to the movies.”
They kick it around for a while. Rachel sits there waiting for it to be decided who she’s going to the movies with. I win by default. I’m afraid they can hear my heart at the prospect of us side by side way back in the empty and dark cathedral with the gilt stars in the blue dome overhead, maybe her hand not rejecting communication with mine if I dare.
The house is packed. But up front there are three empty seats. I’m just behind her, never so close, as we struggle past shifting and jack-knifing knees towards those empty seats in competition with a small old man from the other aisle. My nostrils are keened for the natural perfume of her body (it’s a hot day) but she doesn’t sweat and I don’t get communication that way either. Not even her hair, an inch from my nose, departs from that neutrality.
She sits down in the first of the empty seats and the little old man collapses triumphantly in the seat next to hers. I ask him to let me have that seat. He’s hard of hearing and I have to repeat my request much louder. He points at the mountainous man sitting in front of the third empty seat. I ask him to take Rachel’s seat. She’d take his and I’d cope with the mountainous man. I wouldn’t be paying much attention to Hepburn and Tracy anyhow. He refuses testily. “Shhs” arise all around me like escaping steam.
So the testy old man remains between us. Why did she sit down in that first seat? I weave my head back and forth to catch glimpses of her. A woman behind me tells me to please stop moving my head. I stare sullenly at Hepburn.
In the monk-cell auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art – how much later is this? – there aren’t even two empty seats together. So from opposite sides we watch hairless cadaveric Nosferatu and his plaguish rats devastating the town.
The third and last time we are back in the dark cathedral with the gilt stars in the blue vault for a comedy, at Mrs Morgenstern’s urging and finally Harvey’s command. By now she hardly leaves her room. This time we’re seated side by side. But this is after Josie. Her photo is still topmost. Sometimes I look at Rachel’s profile pallid in the shifting light from the screen. She stares solemnly at the clowning, smiling dutifully when the audience laughs.
But then The Loony Toons comes on. They are supporting the war effort. Regimented swastikaed ducks duckstep past a glowering fore-locked duck and quack: “Venn der Fuehrer says vee ist der Master Race vee Heil (bronx-cheer) Heil (bronx-cheer) right in der Fuehrer’s face.” I haven’t reckoned with the Loony Toons.
Haven’t reckoned with the newsreel either. A city is on fire. The flames play on her face. Cautiously I place my hand over hers on the armrest. It doesn’t withdraw or respond. Of course I couldn’t hope for response but that inertia frightens me and I want her to snatch her hand away as she’d done before. This is toward the end. I place my arm about her shoulder and stroke her bare arm. Of course no head against my shoulder but also no stiffening or contraction, like the last time, no disengagement. I kiss her cheek. Nothing. She goes on looking at the flames as at an arduous equation.
After each return from the movies Harvey asks me how it had been. I find the formulation strange but each time I tell him about the film. First Hepburn and Tracy, then Murnau’s Nosferatuu the Vampire. He doesn’t listen. The third time I don’t talk about the film.
“She’s not well,” I say.
But the Morgensterns know that already.)
One very bad day I decided to scrub the co-dwellers away again, deprive them of their nourishing medium of dirt and disorder as I’d once done in the corridor (it was filthy and populated again by now). But this time I’d do it in the dead room where the sensors manufactured them.
I marched in armed with a pail of soapy water, a brush, rags, a vacuum cleaner, a mop over my shoulder like a rifle. Before I started shifting the furniture to get at the carpet I put my weapons down and wandered about the room trying to visualize the old order. I couldn’t. I went over to one of the sensors. Its lens was still. For some reason I knelt down and approached my eye to that round unblinking eye, trying to look inside, getting only my own inverted image, distorted into caricature.
With a sudden whirring the lens reached out like the ophthalmologist’s instrument that had explored the back of my eye painfully. I pulled back saying, don’t scan my brain upstream. I think it was as a joke. The room filled with a whirring sound
. The three other sensors had joined in.
I got up off my knees and wandered about the room trying again. The piano had been (was) there in that deceptively empty space. Without thinking I avoided it, also the great table from the past. The flowered armchair might have been there, near the window. And Mrs Morgenstern in it, and if so then the striped armchair was opposite and my mother in it. “Hello, Momma,” I felt like saying, almost did, maybe really did, I don’t know, because I heard Hanna say: “Jesus. Jesus.”
She was there in the doorway staring at me wide-eyed. She was in her mangy fur-coat, ready to go out. I remembered it was hospital day. Somehow I knew she’d been there for long minutes, spying on me again, had seen me kneeling and talking to the machine, knew this even before she said:
“Jesus. You’re crazy too, like Harvey. I told you not to go down there. Didn’t I tell him that?”
I grabbed the heavy pail and heaved it at her. I got slopped and blinded in the process. The pail missed her by an inch and banged against the corridor wall. But she got drenched too. She spluttered and swore. Then she crossed the threshold.
She started coming toward me as she had so many times with Harvey. I imagined her overpowering me (suddenly shrunken and frail), sweeping me into her enormous arms and carrying me to the Volvo and the hospital, not his hospital, another kind of hospital.
I grabbed the mop and used it like a bayoneted rifle. My eyes were on fire from the soap. She kept coming. I retreated, jabbing away with the mop as I’d done with the spade at Beth Anderson’s son in her garden at two in the morning months before. Cornered, I slipped behind one of the sensors. An unpleasant crunch underfoot barely registered.
Hanna stopped dead in her tracks. I thought it was one of my vicious jabs until I saw the lens zooming out at her, synchronized with my movement.
She turned and bolted out of the room. I heard her running down the corridor heavily, yelling like a madwoman, “He’s crazy, he’s crazy too, I got two crazy men on my hands.” You could hear that shrill voice of hers all over the house repeating it to the eyeless co-dwellers jerking past her.
When I was able to I started moving out from behind the sensor. I felt the same unpleasant crunch underfoot and saw hundreds of dead roaches on the floor behind the machine. I understood now why that filthy room had been practically free of roaches ever since the sensors had been installed. For some reason they found the attraction of the sensors greater than that of rotten food. It had been fatal to them. Now they had joined the co-dwellers.
I had to lie down on the sofa. The overlapping houses were still on the low table. I became aware of the silence in the room. The sensors had stopped operating. A few minutes later I heard heavy footsteps and strangled sounds in the corridor. Hanna went past the open door bearing Harvey like something sacrificial. He was flailing his arms weakly and squalling. The front door slammed shut. The Volvo started up and pulled away. I was alone in the house.
After a while the phone in the corridor broke the silence. The phone almost never rang in that house. When it did they let it ring on and on until it gave up. Another wrong number Hanna once said. Quickly I got up and left the dead room. I nearly tripped over the pail in the corridor in my hurry to establish a connection, even a wrong one, with the outside world. As I pressed the receiver against my ear and identified myself the thought came that maybe the sensors had contaminated the telephone line too and that I would get a dead voice.
I got a hurried hello from Beth Anderson. I pictured her all dressed up at her phone in her impeccable living room from which I was banished. I controlled my voice and said I was glad to hear from her. She asked if she could please speak to Mr Morgenstern, it was urgent. I told her he was out. I wanted to hold on to her voice. I tried to slip back into the old relationship. Was her TV acting up again? I asked. I might be able to handle it myself. I was Mr Morgenstern’s left-handed right-hand man. Maybe my voice hadn’t been up to handling humorous content. She didn’t laugh. She said:
“You told me he’d give me a good deal of money if I let him set up those things in my living room. How much money did you say again?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
Twenty thousand dollars for her. Twenty thousand dollars for me.
Liberation happened suddenly like that. She’d changed her mind. She was ready to accept Harvey’s proposal. I didn’t have to be a mathematical wizard like him to make the calculation. I’d dispose of more than the magic sum I’d encircled on the page of the first day of April in my agenda-book. I was hours removed from an end to the haunted rooms. I saw myself speeding southwards toward some distant hot empty beach, all this craziness behind me.
She confirmed that she was willing to accept the proposition, provided she got the money right away. I could have said that I’d tell Harvey as soon as he got back. Instead, I said that she should come over right away and have a look at the machines before she decided. Why did I say that? I told myself quickly that it was an excuse to see her again, immediately. I told myself that it was to construct another image of myself in her eyes, to prove my possession of prized virtues like sincerity. I said that Harvey and Hanna had left. She should come over. There was only myself in the house. Another lie.
Oh my God, was the first thing she said when she stepped inside. Each room and passage wrenched another little My God out of her. I explained that I often tried to clean up a little but that it was a hopeless job. She didn’t answer.
From the threshold of the dead room I showed her the four sensors. They were standing idle in their corners. She didn’t say anything, but I thought I knew what she was thinking.
“I told you they were knee-high but you can see that’s not a hundred percent true,” I said.
I wanted to be irreproachably sincere. For her to see the chest-high sensors in obsessive action and to appreciate what was behind them I took her down to the cellar. I had a sense of transgression. Going down there alone in the absence of Harvey would already have been bad enough.
As expected, the red lights produced their chilling effect. There was also the mountainous junk heap with its bloody glints. I sat down at the console, hesitated a moment and then switched on the machine as I’d seen him do so often. She clapped her ears against the rumble and whine and looked scared. Now I could take her upstairs to see the sensors in action. She was staring at the screen. It was flickering. Why hadn’t he switched it off?
Out of the flickering chaos my mother materialized dimly in the striped armchair.
Where are your eyes, Momma? Look away. At Beth Anderson. Staring at the screen. But not reacting. Couldn’t she see it? See her? She (Beth Anderson) didn’t say anything. She’d seen nothing. How come she didn’t see that?
My mother faded away.
Relief. Grief.
Now another ghost, soundlessly banging away on the piano. I waited for her to comment. She said nothing. I switched off the monitor and took her upstairs, took both of them upstairs. I led her into the kitchen (“My God, my God”) and said I would be back in a few minutes.
I went into the bathroom Harvey and Hanna used. I locked the door behind me. My mother persisted. She surcharged the stained washbasin with the uncapped toothpaste tube and the hairbrush full of long hair. She surcharged the shower with crinkly pubic hairs near the drain, the bra and stockings and blue jeans on the tubular shower-curtain support.
I sat down on the closed toilet-seat and waited for her five-second resurrection with eyes. She didn’t resurrect. I could hear Beth calling my name. I filled the washbasin with cold water and plunged my face in it. She was calling my name over and over in alarm. I unlocked the door and joined her in the corridor. My mother was gone.
She said I didn’t look well, was I sick? I spoke of nausea and migraine, hoped she wouldn’t catch it. I needed fresh air. I spent too much time in this house. Would she come with me to the beach one day? She didn’t answer. She looked at her watch. I led her back to the dead room.
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nbsp; The sensors were working now, sniffing out more prey in the cemetery of fragmentary faces and gestures. I stood on the threshold and told her to go on in and have a look.
She went in, fearfully. It was strange to see her there, impeccable and banal in that dusty chaotic space. She turned about uneasily, not trusting the lenses operating in her back. One of them zoomed at her. She pulled back toward the threshold and me.
I said there was no danger for her yet, a few minutes’ exposure was harmless. But if I stood outside on the threshold, I said, it was because I’d been exposed too long already. The effect was cumulative like lead poisoning, saturnism, they called it and I reminded her of Saturn, the Greek Chronos who devoured his children. Nobody came into this room any more except Harvey, it didn’t matter any more for him, I said.
It wasn’t a machine to cure his sickness, I said. That had been another untruth. It was the machine that had given him the sickness.
She stared at me and moved away a second time, not from the sensors this time but from the threshold where I was standing. Why did I go on like that? I said it wouldn’t stop there. I said that with the sensors set up in her living room she would be linked up day and night with the machine in the cellar below. I crossed the threshold.
She stepped back a little again.
I tried to show her the hole behind each one of the sensors with the cable snaking into them through motionless heaps of roaches. Similar holes would be knocked in her living room floor, I warned. Thick cables would run across her flowerbeds into her house. I said that it wouldn’t stop there in her living room. The cables and the sensors would seek better positioning, would go up a flight and summon back a certain room somewhere, the measurements hadn’t been taken yet.
I heard her (Beth) say what room? what are you talking about? aren’t you well?
But her voice was distant and I saw it all so clearly from the other threshold of that other long-ago immeasurable room, a random selection of my brain: both of them seated at her desk over some arduous problem, their heads conspiratorial together and speaking some incomprehensible conspiratorial language, her short hair neat and shiny, the lamplight soft on the oval of the sweet-serious face girls had had then and have lost since, I standing in the doorway commissioned by Mrs Morgenstern to summon them down for dinner, hearing their exclusive gibberish. (Out of this.) So I rehearse “It’s time to eat” in her language and finally say: “Es ist Zeit für uns zu fressen,” and they both look up, Harvey annoyed. (Out of this.)
She predictably corrects me: “Essen, nicht fressen.” Of course I’d known that. “Eat” for humans was “essen,” for animals, “fressen.” It was just to pull her out of the other, inhuman, exclusive language into our own short-lived exclusive one even if exchange was limited to a corrective echo of my own words.
They go back to their problem and their other language and I stand there in unbearable paralysis staring at the curve of her neck and cheek as time goes by more and more slowly.
Get out of it. Out or cross over the threshold into that vanished room. From the threshold the scene replays with no variation possible. Violate the course of things and move across the threshold toward her and then be in it forever in longed-for alteration of events. But then no return ever. Out of it.
Out of it now, down in the cellar, by my own efforts but not then, no non-assisted way out then. It was a deep fall into another time-trap.
I was being shaken out of it. A worn woman in a dirty room, arm stretched out, shaking my shoulder from a safe distance, body tensed for flight, saying fearfully, what’s the matter? What’s the matter with you? Now her hand left my shoulder as she stepped away.
I was back, out of it. I returned to that other, undesired, room, Harvey’s living room, the dead room with the sensors and to the woman, the neighbor, tulips, Beth. Beth Anderson. If she hadn’t shaken me out of it would I have emerged? I wondered, thankful, resentful. Return is the worst of it.
“If you’re not well why don’t you see a doctor?” she was saying. “I’ll call later when Mr Morgenstern returns. I have to go back now.” She started for the door.
“Don’t do that, don’t go back,” I said too urgently. “Give me just a few minutes.”
I excused myself and went into the bathroom again. Again the washbasin with cold water. When I came back a few minutes later it was a little better. She was still standing in the middle of the room, not afraid of the sensors. She stared at me. She didn’t say anything but kept staring at me. To make her say something and stop staring I said:
“You can’t need the money that badly.”
She nodded violently. “Five thousand dollars, right away, today.”
It started returning. I told her that five million wouldn’t be enough, that she’d come down with it too, like me. She didn’t want to be like me, did she? I was doing this for her, I didn’t want anything to happen to her, she was a good person. This was sincere, I said. It was compassion, she should believe me. He’d offered me money if she’d say yes. Say no, you don’t want them in your house. If you don’t say no I’ll break into your house and smash them, I swear I will, and he’ll take the money back and you’ll both have me thrown in jail. It’s a promise.
The promise was conveyed with passionate sincerity. But why hadn’t I already smashed the sensors and behind them the central machine itself?
Why didn’t I smash them then and there, before her eyes?
Why don’t I remove the biting dunce cap and smash them now instead of toying with the red button?
She started crying. Jail had been the wrong word to use. The money was for a lawyer, I made out.
She didn’t have to tell me, I said as all that disorder from another past came back suddenly with her words and I went back to it, embraced it as painful diversion from that even earlier past, the long-ago vanished room, also as a way of drawing close to her in the mode of confession.
She didn’t have to tell me, I repeated. So she didn’t go on telling me about it. She’d taken my phrase literally, as recoil from confidence not as semi-confidence itself. I’d meant that I knew all about it, the inevitable things that happened in such a situation. The money part, even the jail part, wasn’t the worst. She hadn’t been through the worst yet. And now I was glad she’d misunderstood and hadn’t let me confide as I’d wanted to, to prolong the diversion, maybe. How could I have told her how it had ended for us with Keith?
So of course it wound up by my offering her the money myself, all those precious days. I had a warm feeling as though it was for her. Probably at that moment I thought it really was. A loan, I said.
But how will I ever be able to pay you back? she said with that exotic mid-western rectitude of hers.
It was funny in a way. Harvey was about to offer her money to set up the machines and I was offering her money to refuse. I knew he could have outbid me a hundred times over but now it was too late. I’d short-circuited him from the start.
It was a predictable struggle to get her to accept. She thanked me all the way from the depths. I said, shh, it’s nothing, shh, don’t, she’d pay me back when she could. It was the wrong remark, the wrong way around. How could I pay her back for having saved me? We stood there together in the middle of the dead room. I held her, consolingly at first, kissing her wet cheeks, then her neck, then her lips, aware that she might be submitting to it out of gratitude, a purchased familiarity then. But if I was holding her so tightly now, tighter than she was me, I think it was more from fear than desire, the need to feel a real body against mine.
The sensors went on whirring, zooming, tracking.
In a few hundred thousand years we might go through it again one-dimensionally on a screen, not in the unity of an embracing couple but dissected: a knee, a shoulder, an eye in quick senseless succession.
One blowy overcast March morning I found Harvey in the garden under his black umbrella despite the clouds, in case of a surprise attack of sunshine. From time to time
his arm was yanked upward by a sudden gust and I thought he risked being blown aloft, he was so flimsy now.
He didn’t pay attention to it. I thought he was staring at Beth Anderson’s house until he started talking about the birds darting about the feeding station she’d set up. It was an aluminum pole thrust into the lawn with a little platform on top and a spike to hold the block of suet or margarine. It was unusual for him to take notice of outside things.
We looked at their incredible acrobatics for a while. He started croaking things about them. He went on and on. I found it confusing. Or maybe I wasn’t listening closely because suddenly Beth Anderson appeared at her bedroom window in her Saturday morning street-urchin disguise. She began wiping a pane furiously. Her navel beneath the oversized knotted shirt was like an unblinking eye. Harvey’s voice gave out. He started scribbling it on the pad. Beth stopped wiping. All her eyes were fixed on me. She made a timid gesture with her hand. I returned it even more timidly, not to attract Harvey’s attention.
Later in my room I tried to piece together what he’d written in his barely legible scrawl. When he wrote things down I was contractually bound to read.
Stylistically fixed up it was something like this: that of course there was objective time out there, invariable for us at our tiny earthbound fraction of light-speed. But time as perception was variable, wildly so. Those seconds that zipped by like bullets for us were spacious for them. (He meant the birds, the titmice). They could do meaningful things within their seconds which weren’t ours. In a blink of our eyes they darted their beady eyes in all directions, shot, suicidally it seemed, at the tangle of branches and miraculously landed with precision on a twig. They accomplished everything in acceleration it seemed to our eyes but that was the relativity of time-sense. The slower time-sense was ours. For them one of our minutes maybe had the subjective value of a year. For a long-lived tortoise one of our minutes must have seemed a second. To its slow mind maybe the tit was invisible.
Had I ever given this matter much thought? If not, I would have to very soon.
That was the final sentence.
It sounded more like a threat than a prediction. I balled the sheet up and threw it inaccurately at the wastepaper basket. A week before I would have felt alarm. But the shadowy forms below had vanished. There were no more time-traps. I was firmly fixed in this time-stratum where Beth was.
From time to time, though, I couldn’t help hoping it wasn’t just the inactive phase of the cycle.
***