***
Seventeen
How could I sleep? The living room was just beneath my bed, Harvey’s bed, actually. Demented and tetrahydrocanniboled in the bargain, he’d pipe-dreamed that trip back through the time-barrier with the swap of dreary now-minutes for joyous then-hours. But he hadn’t invented the scene. The sensors must have exhumed it. I knew my mother was (had been, I tried to correct) down below chatting with Mrs Morgenstern and in the summer of that final year for her she was certain to be expressing worry about me.
And of course the two women would be talking about Rachel (I had her name back) and be remembering this scene and that scene involving her and I could imagine some of those scenes myself and another the two women couldn’t possibly be in a position to speak about.
I tried the third safeguard, time-travel too but counter time-travel, to the future he claimed didn’t exist, the summer vacation I’d talked to Beth about. We were both on a clean white empty beach. Now running into a big green wave. Over and over.
The old antidote against insomnia worked against the other thing as well.
I slept chaotically through the whole day. What awoke me, at 6:10 pm, was foreboding, quasi time-travel to the immediate future. You read about such instances of prescience. Mothers who suddenly drop their bridge-hand and rush into the nursery and there, sure enough, is the baby toddling, for the first time, but towards an open window.
Bolt upright in bed, I looked about the room for the danger, even sniffed for smoke. Then got up and went over to the window.
There it was (mistakenly I thought that’s what the foreboding was about) down below. Ricky and his friend were staggering toward their cars, each bearing one of my giant teak-cased speakers. In their yawning trunks I could see, like a dismembered baby, the tuner, the amp, the pre-amp, shoved any which way, and box after box of CDs and vinyls.
Beth was standing there on the sidewalk motionless except for her hands strangling a sweater. She had her befuddled tranquilized face. Why wasn’t she stopping them? Why hadn’t she stopped them?
I recovered from paralysis, leaned out and started yelling.
They didn’t stop. Paid no attention to me. Didn’t even accelerate the pace of the operation. Ricky held the loudspeaker like a crate of oranges. Now he roughly threw it onto the rear seat. It bounced about perilously. His friend, a chunky Hispano type, did the same thing in his car with the other speaker. I appealed to the whole neighborhood and the police in a radius of a mile for assistance. Kept it up while struggling into my pants and shoes.
“Stop it! You stop that, you! You shut up!”
Beth had finally intervened. Radius of a mile too, easily. I was the only one she could be yelling at to shut up. Who else? The two others hadn’t said a word. Devoted themselves wholly to the task. I yelled again. She yelled back.
“That’s the hi-fi I bought for my son and I can prove it. You stop that, you!”
Now like honest workmen at the end of a job they clapped their hands free of imagined dust (I’d warred on the slightest speck on my components), slammed the rear-doors shut, bang, bang, and got into their cars.
What did I do then? Was it possible?
I’ll need Lord’s assistance for this. Let me grope for the flask and guide it through the tangle of wires to my lips. That sweet blandness in my mouth turns to fire in my gut. Ulcers? Worse? The price to pay. Pay again. Again. Now: what did I do then? Was it possible? Distance. View him from way above, practice safe detachment, lucid dissociation. Look down at him blundering away. Match his grimaces with grins. Try to double up with laughter when he doubles up with pain. What does he do next? Is it possible?
Rushes downstairs, still buttoning up his shirt, almost tripping over the unlaced shoes and bursts out of the gate in time to see the two cars picking up speed. Sprints after them, eyes glued to the dwindling license plate of her son’s car. Halts in the middle of the street, panting. Mumbles the numbers, frisks himself for a pen not to forget, returns to where she’s standing, strangling her sweater again, maybe crying a little. “A pen, quick,” he commands. She has no pen, she replies in a tiny bewildered voice. A pencil, anything. No pencil, either.
Now what’s he doing? Running through her open gate, looking around for a stick on that impeccable lawn of hers. Finally takes off a shoe, yes, his shoe, hops over and with the toe of the shoe starts inscribing the plate-number deep in the soil of her long tulip-bed.
When she finally understands what it’s all about she rushes over and starts stomping all over the figures, shouting jumbled numbers to efface the real plate numbers from his mind as her feet are doing to the soil-inscription, crushing tulips in the process, also jostling him as, one-footed, he tries to protect those inscriptions. Her head barely comes up to his shoulder but he warns her, very loudly: “Don’t you knock me down again.” By a sinister coincidence he’s in the same spot as the night she shoved him into forget-me-nots and mud.
“You leave my flowers alone,” she pants out, going on crushing more of them.
He’s never seen a relationship disintegrate so fast. A sudden revelation of their true center of gravity, not each other. He tries to gain command over himself. Holds his hand up and says or shouts: “Stop. Let’s stop this. Let’s reason. Let’s be reasonable.” Puts his dirty left shoe back on.
She stops immediately. Can afford to, he thinks bitterly. She’s trampled the numbers out of the flowerbed, jostled them out of his mind. She looks about bewildered, blinking. As if she’s emerging from a dream. Kneels and administers first aid to the tulips.
There’s no problem to get excited about, he says very loudly to her back. It’s very simple. He wants his hi-fi back and in good condition and right away. Also the records. She should contact Ricky immediately. She goes on nursing the tulips. He has to repeat it, much louder.
Finally she gets up and says he has no right to make such wild accusations, yelling for the police like that. It’s all his fault anyway. He promised to come over at seven that morning and take it away. She phoned and phoned and phoned and never got an answer. Anyhow it wasn’t Ricky, it was that awful friend of his. She doesn’t know where Ricky lives. He moves about. But it wasn’t Ricky. It was the other, that awful José. No, she doesn’t know where José lives either, doesn’t even know his family name.
Yes, of course, he says: José, not Ricky. Ricky had just been giving him a friendly hand. Why the goddam hell hadn’t she done something? Stopped them? Phoned him? Let the air out of their tires?
He projects these questions with great force and emotion and realizes he’s already in the impotent stage of recriminations. He pictures the two cars far away by now, his delicate components bumping together dangerously. He feels weak and jostled by his heart. Has to sit down on her white-lacquered bench near the sheet-iron Disney deer. Closes his eyes and tries to calm the inner uproar.
After a while something touches his foot softly. Beth is kneeling in front of him and trying to clean his left shoe with her sweater.
“Oh your shoe, Jerry, I’ll buy you another one, brand-new.”
He stares, thinking she’s talking about his left shoe. Then realizes she means a hi-fi system. It officializes the loss, he feels. It’s gone forever, a part of himself, like his heart or liver. How can he ever get up from the bench without heart or liver?
Following the initial shock comes grief and outrage. After, he won’t be able to remember how much he poured forth or kept burning within like molten lava. He’ll imagine his lamentations were Old Testamental, testifying to triumph over the apostasy of his blond (slightly graying) hair, blue eyes and somewhat sagging Greek profile. He’ll recall that June, his first wife, Christian like the second one, used to refer to his “Job bit.” He’ll suppose that he must have mourned Eastern-wise his handcrafted Kos 321 amplifier, his gold-wired Poly-Astroc speakers. And the records, his rare vinyl pressings with three diamond-point needles dedicated exclusively to them in rotation, his Busches, his Budapests
, his Schnabels and Scherchens and the CDs: 1,854 of them in the card-catalogue Ricky probably hadn’t bothered stealing, four-fifths of all the recorded Bach cantatas, all of the Mozart and Haydn quartets, four different versions of the Beethoven quartets, Busch, Berg, Italiano, Vegh.
Vegh, oye Vegh.
She repeats that she’ll buy him an even better hi-fi system. He says that the best available isn’t half as good. It’s practically a funeral eulogy. You can’t find those components on the market anymore, he says. It’s like poking about in a junk-shop to replace a stolen Rembrandt. Why the goddam hell hadn’t she phoned him when they started in?
She’d been afraid of violence. That night you almost killed him with the spade, she says and then with no logical transition says he called her a whore, his own mother, when he saw the room, but she did it for him, that money had been for him. I never wanted you to bring it into my house. Last night I told you to take it back. Why didn’t you do that? Why did you insist on staying? Why did you take advantage of me?
With that profound intellectual dishonesty inscribed from conception in female genes, she’s reversed the situation. He’s at fault for what happened.
Flare of anger: says that her son is costing him a fortune. First five thousand dollars and now his hi-fi and records. They were – had been – his universe. He actually uses that expression. His personal universe is going to be swapped for a few adulterated fixes, he says. She has to get it back. Better she than the police.
How can he say such a thing? such a horrible thing? she whispers. I didn’t know you, I didn’t know you.
It’s like an echo of other distant feminine voices except they’d known him much longer before realizing they hadn’t really.
It goes on and on, down and down, like a fall off a cliff, at first grabbing at tree-roots, grass tufts, granite outcroppings to check the fall and then giving up grabbing at things, not able to or not wanting to. They were in fatal free-fall.
Now she’s accusing him of having taken advantage of her that day with his money. He’s tempted to say that if it had been for that he could have gotten better value for his money. Maybe he actually says something like that. It ends with her saying that she’ll pay him back for everything, his machine, his records, his five thousand dollars. You’ll get your pound of flesh, she says.
She shouldn’t have said that, he thinks. It was predictable that with all the crooked “z”s and noosed “y”s in her maiden name (he thinks) she’d say it one day. It’s a thing she shouldn’t have said. But why does he have a feeling of relief on hearing her say that definitive thing?
He replies, calmly he thinks, that he knows she knows where Ricky lives, has his phone-number. She should contact him as quickly as possible, tell him to bring the hi-fi and the records back and no questions will be asked. If not, the police will be notified.
You just try that, she says in a low menacing voice, her face suddenly aged and ugly (as he sees it). She says he can call in the FBI if he likes. She’s the owner of the house. No one’s broken in. Except you, right now.
At that he retorts that she’s the owner of the house all right but he’s the owner of the hi-fi as the police will be told if it’s not back by tomorrow evening.
What hi-fi? she says. Get out of here.
Doubly dispossessed, he turns around and leaves that house.
Back on the bed I tried for a while to believe it was one of the nightmares of the day I’d slept through. How could it have imploded like that, so fast? We’d each blundered into the other’s elaborately mined sanctuary. Reserved zones usually turn out to be mutually antagonistic. Music, indissociable from the machine that vehicled it, was revealed to be mine, her son hers.
Put like that it makes me seem essentially deficient, I know, prizing teak and transistors over flesh and blood. Somewhere along the line she’d made that point. I tried to retort to myself as I hadn’t to her that it wasn’t machine versus flesh and blood, anyone but a monster knew what choice to make in such an abstract opposition, but my machine (key to the nearest I’d ever come to paradise) versus her flesh and blood, violent and grubbing, thieving, exploitive and insulting. That changed the fundamentals of the problem altogether.
I did have to admit though that I’d never seen a woman so uncompromisingly dedicated to another human being who treated her like shit. Maybe Hanna. I couldn’t help feeling a certain grudging admiration and envy, not quite sure about the nature of the envy. To be the object of such dedication? To be capable of it myself?
I thought of the foreboding that had awakened me an hour before. It had been foreboding of loss all right, but more than the loss of my hi-fi system, deeper even than the loss of what I felt was my ultimate woman. Beth Anderson now enlarged into a whole dimension of time. Losing her I’d lost my future.
I sought comfort. That future wouldn’t have been an empty white beach (did such beaches exist any more?) and an instant in a green wave as I’d imagined. My future would have been the daily reality of chintz, iron lawn-deer, tooth-picked olives, imposed conditions for tenderness with tears at the end as after violation, all the rest, including her crazy husband and her son. Wasn’t that the deep reason for what I’d said and done, to avoid a future defined in those terms?
After a while I revisited the shack in the old days. There was the Ruhmkorff Coil, the deadly Russian snake with spark-fangs and the Static Electricity Machine, the miniature lightning-bolt between the brass balls, it could kill you. I recaptured the pine-shelves with the whorled knots in them and the jars and bottles. The dangerous ones had skull-and-cross-bones on their labels. Mrs Morgenstern had insisted on that. There was bichloride of mercury, I didn’t remember the formula for it. There was arsenic disulfide, potassium cyanide, I didn’t remember the formulas for them either. There in a blue cork-stoppered jar was lead acetate. The skull grinned above the name. I still remembered the formula: Pb (C2H3O2)2.
A few days later I told Harvey I wanted to visit my mother. No alcohol, though, no drugs.
He tried to initiate me to the navigating technique. It was elementary, he said. This gauge so, that one so, the switch, then a simple conversion formula, and depending where the red needle was you added this, the square-root of that, made the final adjustments in consequence, pressed the red button and there you were. Or were supposed to be.
He had to do it for me. He said that maybe he’d simplify the already simple arithmetic part one day and put it down in writing for me.
He showed me the four knobs on the helmet. They were graduated from one to nine. Theoretically you could choose a 1: 9999 time-ratio. But for the moment anything over 1: 200 risked being dangerous. I remembered that. One night his eyes suddenly bulged and he yelled mutely. It was like me long ago with the anti-Polack device. His hands clawed at the helmet. I grabbed a dry rag and yanked it off. There was a red welt on his forehead where the rim of the helmet had sat. He had to lie down. It was no short-circuit, he said. The greater the time-ratio the more you felt it. It was something that could be eliminated in time.
He chose “a nice safe 1: 12” for me. I made sure it was that. I didn’t want to be a guinea pig.
So on April 29 at 11:15 pm I raised the heavy helmet and crowned myself. It was heavy and the springed metal clamps were unpleasantly cold on my forehead. Blur and flicker. Finally something like her swam up on the screen. I pressed the red button.
Did I really voyage? Yearning predisposes you to self-deception. I had the example of Harvey. It was true that after a while the housing-unit disappeared and I lost consciousness of the screen as though I’d gone through and behind it and into that old living room. But that might have been because my face drew closer and closer to the image of my mother and everything else became peripheral.
No denying that my mother was there on (or behind) the screen and Mrs Morgenstern too, in the positions he’d said. But the experience didn’t correspond at all to his description. There wasn’t any three-dimensional effect. I
t wasn’t like a stereoscope at all. There wasn’t even color. The image was sepia and flat. It flickered and had stains like a tintype from the middle of the nineteenth century. It was the visual equivalent of those old static-riddled voices we’d heard down in the cellar that night. I could barely make out my eyeless mother’s lips. They were probably moving, forming words but were those words what Harvey said they were?
Stupidly I tried to reassure her, tell her she shouldn’t worry about me. Of course it didn’t work. Couldn’t possibly have worked. I could see her, imperfectly, but she couldn’t see me, assuming I’d joined her. Anyhow, there was no sound. That much was true too. The silence was absolute as in the deepest of vaults. Or was it the silence of the cellar?
Then you had to endure random spatial selection. Forced contemplation of a blank wall or a ceiling molding didn’t procure joy as he said it did. It procured boredom and depression. When the women came back, stained, fuzzy and flickering, it was even worse.
Finally, time there wasn’t what he’d said it was. That was the greatest of his swindles. Awakening out of it I was at first thankful it hadn’t lasted weeks as supposedly it had with him. He’d gotten that time-ratio business all wrong. Or else it operated differently for me. I had the feeling I’d spent no more than a quarter of an hour in that earlier living room. But when outward focus came I saw that it was 2:17 am.
I’d spent over three hours of now-time to get a quarter of an hour back there, assuming I’d been back there. That gave a ratio of 1: 12 all right, but the wrong way. It wasn’t all that different from my own private time-trips flat on my back.
When I emerged from whatever it had been – voyage back there or self-hypnosis – I blessed the dank cellar. I wrenched off the helmet from my burning forehead and stammered it all out to Harvey. He was lying blurred on his cot gnawing at a slice of salami. His cot was the unavoidable way-station for a little food and sleep between trips. He took a long time answering.
Finally he said I hadn’t been in a state of maximum receptivity. He said it in his new monocordal far-away voice which resulted either from the trips or, more likely, from the preparations for the trips. The cellar reeked of joints. In a few minutes it would be his turn.
The brain had to be sleep-starved he said. He himself conceded no more than two hours to the waste of sleep and unselected dream images. Whereas I’d been squandering most of my time on my bed, day and night, for the past week. He also blamed salt and caffeine. I should experiment as he’d done. Never again, I said. As if he hadn’t heard me he went on. He reminded me that whiskey had had distinctly negative effects on him. I should try the sweet California white wine, Lord’s Vineyards. Never again, I repeated much louder. I should try a joint, more than one joint, although he was running low on them, Hanna would have to do something about that.
I rubbed my forehead where it burned and told him I didn’t want any drugs, no drugs for me, ever. Also I didn’t want to return to that sequence ever again. He should activate something else, radically different. Couldn’t he perfect the car-relay and drive out to the picnic-area in Bear Mountain Park and place me in the time of early childhood with my parents and Aunt Ruth, grilling steaks in the fall, those yellow and red trees? Too far away in time and distance, said Harvey after a while. No, it had to be in the living room. Another image, then, I said. People not close to me. The visit of the Fuller Brush man or even the reform rabbi, for example, I said although I knew I’d never undergo supposed time-travel for strangers. He processed the question and after a while said, hardly audible, that it had to be the same scene for the sake of control. He himself went visiting that scene all the time. The last visit, that afternoon, number nineteen, had lasted a year, he said.
A year for his brain back there he meant. Looking at him you could almost believe that the rest of him had participated in the voyage too, had undergone the passage of that subjective time. For months his face had been wrapping tighter and tighter about his skull. Now it seemed to be letting go, drooping down and away from the bones. It resulted in an overlap of faces, both posthumous. All that time he thought he was winning back there seemed to be borrowed from time here.
Of course there was a rational explanation. It was the dying process, going on in all of us, but in his case accelerated by what he had and by his refusal to have it treated. Also all the things he was taking to trick his brain into believing in the expansion of time and the recapture of a loved-one in three-dimensional color.
After, I looked in the bathroom mirror. There was a faint red mark on my forehead where the helmet had clamped me. It faded in a few hours but the burning sensation went on for days.
Over and over Hanna yelled at him to resume the hospital treatment, to stop going down there in the cellar. He probably didn’t even hear her. During his trips she’d stand for hours in front of the new door he’d had installed to replace the one she’d splintered. It was much stouter and secured by a multitude of locks and bolts. It would be her shoulder-bones that would splinter now if she tried to ram it open again. I know he’s dead, she’d wail over and over when I went past. There was no way to check. He’d shoved a sheet of plywood against the ventilator we’d looked through that night under the elm.
We lost all contact with the world outside, the contemporary one. It didn’t even intrude in the form of TV images and voices. Hanna didn’t sit in front of that screen anymore. She seemed to be spending all her time in front of the locked and bolted cellar door or else at the kitchen-table with beer. Harvey was traveling under the permanent-wave helmet. (He didn’t even go outside to watch me burning things in the garden although I did see him at a window inspecting the job.)
I did no traveling of any sort. Cured or in the inactive phase of time-sickness, I wandered about the house aimlessly in all the rooms including the dead room. From the window I could see that the letterbox was beginning to overflow. It could only have been junk mail. Who else would bother writing to the three people in that house? Nobody answered the phone when it rang as it did six or seven times. It could only have been wrong numbers.
One evening all the lights in the house went out, room by room. The sensors were disarmed. The fuses were gone. The spares too. We groped about in the gloom with scary faces above our candle-flame like apparitions, looking for fuses, she pretending to. Jerry did it, she said. She’d seen me doing it. Finally Harvey found the fuses where she’d hidden them. He knew how her mind operated. He warned her never to do that again.
One day she barred the passage to the cellar. Bulked in front of the door, great bare arms folded. Get out of my way, he croaked over and over. Finally he told her if she didn’t get out of the way she’d be out on her ass without a cent to her name, she had ten seconds to move away from the door or move out of the house.
She cursed him, wailed, let him have the door and returned to the kitchen. Later, when I went in to grab a bite she was still wailing. There must have been a dozen empty beer-bottles on the Formica table.
Bust it, she said to me. Bust it. She meant the machine. It was killing him. He was losing weight. Every day she waylaid him and swept him up struggling in her arms. In a single day he’d lost two pounds. She could tell, to the ounce, she said. Bust it.
I couldn’t do that, I said, squashing a passing roach. It wasn’t my property.
She urged me to put sugar in it. Nobody would know. She even lurched over to the cupboard and got a bowl of sugar which she plunked down on the table in front of me. She’d heard that if you put sugar in the gas-tank of a car it would ruin the engine and nobody could tell. She thought the recipe applied to any machine.
“I’d do it myself, bust the goddam thing. For him, the sonofabitch. But if I did where’d I go? You heard him. I got nowhere to go. I’d starve on my ass in the street.”
“You won’t starve. You’ll have plenty of money. You’ll be able to go anywhere.”
It was just to say something to console her. Instead of being consoled she started ye
lling at me.
“I don’t wanna have plenty of money. I don’t wanna be rich. Where’d I go without Harvey?”
She mumbled disjointed things about their life together. I didn’t pay attention except when she said that during all that time he’d never once been in her, couldn’t, never had been able to with any woman.
One day I was poking about for a tool in a dark corner of the cellar when I saw Hanna tip-toeing down the stairs with a sledgehammer. I’d forgotten to lock the door. Harvey was sleeping on the cot between trips. He was hardly with us now. What followed was another of those decisive moments in your life, as you realize only later, where you are defined not only to others but also to yourself through spontaneous action. I found myself spontaneously grappling with her, trying to pull down and away the massive hammerhead poised above the console.
Harvey tottered over with a length of two-by-four and slammed her over the head with it all his might. If he’d had the might of his intention he’d have brained her. I caught the sledgehammer just in time over the console as she jolted down to her knees, blood streaming down her face. Then I grabbed his wrists as he aimed another blow at her head, wrenched the wood free and flung it into a corner.
I helped her to her feet and guided her to the cot. The blood blinded her. Harvey ordered her out of the house while I mopped up the blood on her face with a handkerchief.
I won’t go, I won’t go, she kept on moaning and she didn’t. Harvey tried to scream at me for not having locked the door. If he’d had any strength left he’d have tried to whack me over the head too.
So she stayed. She went around for days with her hair clotted up with black blood. It gave off a battlefield stench and attracted bluebottle flies. When I urged her to wash her hair and disinfect the wound and apply a bandage she refused and said she wanted to shame me, wanted me to see what I’d done to her. She claimed I’d been the one who’d slammed her over the head. Harvey would never have done that.
Maybe not but she didn’t talk to him any more for a long time. He noticed it only when he had to repeat for the fifth time his order for her to go to the hospital and get more marijuana for him.
Up yours, she finally said. Not just to get even with him. She’d learned to associate the reek of the drug there with the machine and his sinking condition. So he deputized me to look into it, to see his doctor at the hospital.
I agreed if only to fill the present. That’s all I had now. Ever since that machine-assisted trip I was cured of my own time-travels. I was delivered of the past. There were no more time-traps. I was in full possession of the present and didn’t know what to do with it. It was empty. I was like a man who’d constructed his existence about a grave malady and suddenly finds himself cured with no alternative existence conceivable.
Sometimes I wondered if my homemade images of the past hadn’t been devalued by that machine-assisted trip back to mid-July 1952.
By now I was inclined to think it had really been a trip of sorts. The beloved dead stored in my mind were clear and in color but somehow (despite all the things I’d told Harvey about the superiority of the images in my head to the images on his screen) lacking something essential. The two women I’d seen were splotched and blurred and flickering but they were authentic. This feeling had been building up steadily in the days that followed the trip. And now, slowly, I explored the idea that for some reason the distortion wasn’t in Mrs Morgenstern and my mother chatting away in the striped and flowered armchairs. They were there integral and I had been there too, part of me anyhow, but there had been some kind of shifting dirty veil between us, much closer to me than to them. Sometimes I could almost believe that the distorting veil was a defect or inadequacy of my perception.
So to occupy the present I went outside, for the first time in weeks, not counting my contractual garden fires. The daylight glared painfully. Going past I was careful not to look at the other house with the tulips and the iron deer. As soon as I was a mile or so from the two houses I began feeling much better.
There was irony in what Harvey’s doctor told me when I asked for more marijuana for him. He said that marijuana had no curative virtues so far as the disease was concerned. Simply, it attenuated the nausea of the ray and chemotherapy treatment. But since Mr Morgenstern refused that treatment there was no need for marijuana any more. He’d refused the treatment, I knew, because it blocked time-travel. But for successful time-travel marijuana was apparently indispensable. It was some sort of vicious circle.
I told the doctor that maybe he’d developed a taste for joints independent of their therapeutic value. If it helped stave up his morale why shouldn’t he be issued more? He shrugged and said that didn’t concern the hospital. If what I said about his morale was true, marijuana wasn’t all that difficult to find was it? I shouldn’t quote him.
When I explained why I’d come back empty-handed Harvey repeated the doctor’s words. Marijuana shouldn’t be that hard to find. Half the population of the United States smoked it. The other half must peddle it. Tomorrow I was to pick up five hundred dollars’ worth.
Easy to say, “Go out and pick up five hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana,” but where do you go? who do you ask? You can’t sidle up to unknown people and proposition them. You have to be sidled up to and propositioned.
So I walked about Spanish Harlem, aimless and yet expectative, hoping to be propositioned and dreading it. Hadn’t I read about come-on dealers who at the moment of transaction flash their badge and snap cuffs on you? If it had been a dozen joints, OK, but he wanted me to buy enough for months. How many years could you get for that?
I strolled past immobile figures in shabby doorways and when I felt magic X-ray tube stares at the virile bulge the five-hundred-dollar roll made in my pocket, walked faster. But I wasn’t mugged or propositioned. You felt they were nocturnal activities. The dealers and muggers must have been snoring the profitless daylight hours away. I’d be damned if I’d venture into that neighborhood at night.
I tried shabby bars with crude green and orange neons. In one bar I drank beer next to a smoking young couple. Wasn’t it that? “Good stuff,” I said expertly. I got a clammed-up narrow-eyed response. In another bar I surprised myself humming La Cucaracha over more beer. It wasn’t meant to be a signal. Ideas and feelings prompt music in me spontaneously. Minor triumphs come out as imperial Handel. Grief is usually orchestrated by slow Purcell. At one stocktaking period of my life it bothered me, this expression of feeling in other men’s definitive formulations, a kind of emotional prosthesis.
Anyhow the girl behind the bar looked at me as I hummed away. She was a cute little Hispano trick with a mop of frizzy black hair and a big crimson mouth over a lovely weak chin. “You wan somethin else?” It was no crime to sing the words of an old Mexican song. “Ya no tengo que fumar,” I sang low but distinctly. She pointed to a shelf with cigarettes. I shook my head. “All we got,” she said. Her boy friend came over and asked me belligerently what I wanted. “Nada,” I replied like a character in a Hemingway story, paid and left.
The second day was like the first. At day’s end I found myself on a Washington Square bench for nostalgia’s sake, selectively watching students swaying past.
The man on the other end of my bench must have been deep in his eighties, but natty and spry, insistently at peace with the universe, smiling benignly at the pigeons and perambulated babies, then at me, then at the sky, then at me. He gave off eau de cologne. It must have taken him half the day to get dressed for his daily show on the bench where he scored with his expensive UK shoes, flannel trousers, monogrammed blazer, polka-dotted blue scarf to hide age at his throat, pink silk shirt, cuffs half-hiding the wormy veins of his hands.
Seeing that, I thought that to be tolerable extreme old age must be assumed utterly as Rembrandt’s aged did or like a Hindu fakir with metaphysical bony nakedness beneath the white tangle of hair and beard. Actually I couldn’t imagine myself ever assuming it any way or it ever being
tolerable. But I couldn’t imagine griming it either as he did. Maybe the solution is not to get that far.
Now Natty Spry was peering at me. I peered back. A familiar younger face haunted the present wreckage. He recognized me first.
“Why goodness gracious, I know you. Oh you’ve aged greatly but you’ve still got those eyes. You were such a handsome boy. A C- student as I remember but strikingly handsome. Your eyes haven’t changed one bit. Old turquoise. Chinese grave-jade. My heart used to beat. How disruptive you were for the girls in my class and for me. Cruel. Your name is Whiteman, Gerald.”
That fussily precise voice. I knew who he was now. Mr Venezelous, my English instructor at NYU almost forty years ago, Greek in every sense of the word. That C- was faulty memory or characteristic waspishness. I’d been his best student. He’d kept on inviting me up to his place just off Washington Square for a drink. I accepted, once. It turned out there were other things involved with the drink, not just salmon-eggs and Greek olives.
“Whiteman, Gerald,” he repeated triumphantly. “Is that true or is that not true?”
“Weizman, Jerry,” I corrected.
I was impressed anyhow, despite that C- slip. Would my axons and cerebella peduncles be performing like that in undesired twenty-five years’ time?
“Yes,” he said triumphantly as though I’d confirmed not corrected. “You’ve aged beautifully, Gerald. It’s an art, as you can see.” He smiled modestly on perfect teeth and started musing audibly.
“Gerald Whiteman the womanizer. Gerald the masher. The heart-smasher. The juvenile Don Juan. How well I recall you.” It was another impressive performance. He was as good as Roget’s Thesaurus. Now he forgot me completely. “Hello, baby!” Was he talking to the passing mother or to her child? “Marvelous day,” he congratulated the sky, then returned to me. “Despite those eyes one of my worst students as I remember. And I remember pretty damn well. A straight-F student. Gerald and the Three Fs. O that lovely pink cloud up there.” I followed his gaze. The sky was uniformly leaden. “O the birds, flocks of birds!” A solitary pigeon flew overhead. A dachshund waddled over and sniffed his beautifully stitched black shoes. “Meeow,” he greeted. “O the terrible great puma. Don’t devour me.”
Would I be like that in a few years? If you absolutely couldn’t avoid getting that far maybe it was the best way to be after all.
He took out a gold-plated case, extracted a thin cigarette and lit up with a gold-plated Ronson.
Could it be? Could. Was. The unmistakable reek, creator of pink cloud, puma, the dead chatting three-dimensional in elongated time.
He smiled with delight when I opened up to him about my quest and told me about grades and qualities, about charas, bhang, takrouri, sweet dawamesk, the divine gandjah. Above all, in what bar and at what times and what the purveyor looked like. He even told me the color of his eyes.
I came back with only a fraction of what Harvey had wanted. I was taking no chances being nabbed with five hundred dollars’ worth of the stuff. As it was, with the little I had stashed under the right front-seat, I drove back to Forest Hill very slowly, very carefully, sweating profusely.
Refueled, Harvey returned to the cellar and the helmet and explored the chemically enhanced past. I lay on my back on the bed and explored the unimproved present, my only temporal dimension now. It’s a hard one to be stranded in when it consists exclusively of somebody else’s four walls, drawn curtains and a blank ceiling. My passport had expired to all other places and times.
One long night there was another storm. The wind howled and buffeted the house. I tried to imagine it wrenched loose and sailing seawards. Ash-can covers started on their noisy trip down the street. Was she chasing hers? The tree outside threshed about like posthumous Schubert. The dull thumping started up again. It kept banging against the house like a fist against a locked door. I counted and counted but this time it didn’t put me to sleep. I’d have to remember to get Hanna to climb up that ladder and saw the branch off.
I’d said never again and also not that way but I ended up returning there Harvey’s way. Maybe the distortion had been in me. It was to better her, if the thing could be done, rid her of splotch and flicker, restore her eyes, bring her into three dimensions and color, to see her lips better. See her the way Harvey had. Maybe she was saying other things. It was to see her again, any way and to experience joy doing it.
Once again I muffed the techniques of time-navigation and Harvey had to do it for me. It irritated him. Once again he said he’d try to simplify the entry procedures and write it down for me. I sat down coiffed at the console before the screen, at time-ratio 1:20, feeling muddled and queasy from the preparatives to voyage. I imagined in shame Keith seeing his father that way.
This time the image opened up. I entered. I wasn’t outside looking in but inside with her. There was her face in random selection interrupted by the billowing curtain and a fly on a windowpane. Where is the promised color and dimension? The room is still blotch and blur and flicker and silence like the grave. All I’m getting is the feeling, stronger, of authenticity (that she is there and me with her a very little bit). Now closer, great imperfect close-ups of her face. But there’s nothing of the promised joy. She’s still eyeless. I see the illness that will painfully kill her soon, it’s a certitude, a kind of time-travel forward. Now the billowing drapes, gray sunflowers, over and over. Now the fly crawling up the windowpane. Bigger and bigger. Now her lips also macro, crevassed. I try to read the meaning of those moving lips. This is the fourth time after the gray sunflowers and the fly and I think what she is saying is: “My Jerry’s never been the same either.” She’s starting to fade, the billowing gray flowers too, the gigantic black and hairy fly too and now emergence with hopeless grief.
Emergence from that first enhanced voyage a year ago with grieved awareness of the joint-butts and the empty bottle at my feet and the possible self-swindle of it all. Also emergence from it a year later, now, without nausea but with the original grief. It was a time-trap again. I got sucked down into there and then.
What did I do then a year ago in the same position as now?
What I could do now.
Took off the helmet and groped upstairs. Blundered out into the meaningless real world, the garden. I was blinded by the high sun.
I’d started the trip at eleven in the evening.
It was noon the next day.
That fifteen-minute trip had lasted thirteen hours and nine minutes of here-time, real-time. The ratio had expanded, wildly. Way more than 1:20. And in the wrong direction. Tit-time for him there, maybe. It had been plated tortoise-time for me. My forehead burned violently.
I was retching up nothing painfully into the tangle of new and dead grass under the elm when I heard her voice, more detached than anxious. “Are you sick too?” I couldn’t answer. “Everybody’s down with it at Dave and Tom’s. It’s Singapore flu. Or Taiwanese. I have things to settle your stomach with in the house, if you like. Oh God, was I sick. I thought I’d die.”
She was in exactly the same position as the first time I’d seen her on the other side of the fence, clutching the meshes with one hand but not holding a bag of tulip-bulbs with the other this time. They’d already been planted. They were up like red and yellow flames behind her. Some were already drooping. “But I can’t give it to you through the fence. Come on over just a minute. I’m not afraid of catching it from you. I already had it.”
She guided me across her disordered living room up the dusty staircase. She talked about sickness and medicine without pause and when we reached the landing steered me toward the guestroom but I resisted going that way. There’s something I wanted to show you there she said but I resisted. She took me into her bedroom and told me to lie down. From the bathroom I heard water filling a glass and the clink of a spoon and her voice going on about sickness. I fell asleep and when I woke up she was sitting on the edge of the bed holding the glass and staring down at me.
; She said she’d phoned over and over during those two weeks but had never got an answer. She hadn’t dared knock on the front door. So she’d written a long letter and put it in his mailbox. She soon realized that nobody picked up the mail anymore. I should read it. There were things in it she couldn’t say. And in a little while I should go into the guestroom. From her bedroom she’d seen a little of me in my bedroom through the gap of the drawn curtains, just my feet on the bed, almost whenever she looked. He must be sick too to be in bed all the time like that, she’d thought and hoped it was the same thing that was wrong with her. Once she’d seen me at the window. I looked terrible. I still did, even worse, much worse. What was that ugly red welt on my forehead?
She put her hand on my forehead. I reached up and held on tight to her and spoke my first words since my return from where I’d been. I said I didn’t want to go back to the other house or stay in this one. We should leave together for somewhere far away.
She simplified us. The drapes were drawn but all the lights in the room were on us. I’m shameless, she exulted, strenuous in the middle of the thirty wall spectators, atoning for past passivity, silence and final tears. I did this, I did that, saying crudely what she’d just done for my passive pleasure (the doing and saying) and now I’m going to do this, she said and did.
Had I liked that? she whispered at the end.
I’d loved it, I whispered back as in the old radio wine-commercial.
I saw the picturesque dome-shaped scrolled radio with the yellowed celluloid tuning screen and my mother leaning toward it.
Quickly I spoke to her of the seaside in June. She said yes.
***